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Mini Drives for Mini-CDs?
fist_187 asks: "i'm working on a semi-portable MP3 player project, and would like to include a CD-ROM drive in my setup, but a full size drive is a little bigger than I'd like. so, I thought about using a drive designed for mini-CDs...but I can't find any! I know that there are several MP3 portables that use mini-CDs, but does someone know where to find the drives themselves (preferably in a USB or IDE variety)? The only thing I've been able to find, after some searching, is the Imation RipGO!, but that's already a player... defeating the purpose of building from scratch in the first place. Does anyone have advice on where to look?"
I've filled out the full size bays in quite a number of machines I have, and most still have floppy size bays available. I could put a floppy or zip drive in there, but a floppy is way too tight to build the rescue disk system I need to have (because it has more software than can ever fit on a floppy ... it's about 32MB in size). I've tried Zip drives, but all three I've used turn out to be regularly unreliable (I can coax them to work, but this isn't the kind of thing I want to put in customer locations). Maybe it's the media, but either way, the Zip drive option isn't where I want to go.
A small mini-CD drive that fits in the floppy drive bay would be ideal. Such a product would also let us start downsizing computer cases in a lot of new ways for the special purposes that don't need large amounts of CD data (such as firewalls and specialized mini-servers).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If you plan on making a few thousand units you'll be able to work with the asian companies that make the mechanical portions of these drives that you can put in your product.
Other than that, no one is interested in making a mass produced version simply because it holds so little data. Perhaps if someone would finally come out with an 80mm DVD then the players for that (~1GB for dual layer) might be enough data to make it worthwhile.
At this point, I'd suggest you simply use a large 2.5" or 1.8" or compactflash hard drive.
No one wants to carry their music seperate from their players anymore anyway. It's cheaper to have them seperate now, and the user interface is a little easier since you don't have to spend so much time catagorizing your music and playlists, but this isn't the case for the IPOD, and future devices aren't likely to continue to do it this way.
-Adam