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?"

Comments

I've been looking for these, too.

[Skapare]

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).