High-Capacity PCMCIA Drives for Backup?

jspivack asks: "My dad is looking for a very portable backup system for his laptop. He's tired of going without his apps and data for days on end when it goes down - and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair. I figured this would be the perfect use for a high-capacity PCMCIA hard drive: he could just keep it in his slot and make a nightly carbon-copy of his main HD. No external messiness to deal with. And if his machine goes down, he just pops out the drive and pops it into a loaner machine. The problem is, I've googled around and it would seem that Toshiba only makes PCMCIA drives in a 5GB flavor, despite the fact that they have 1.8" drives going to 60GB. Have I missed some other high-capacity (>=20Gb) -internal- PCMCIA drives (Google's not perfect, and neither am I)? Does anyone know if I could buy a 5GB PCMCIA drive and a larger 'embedded' drive and just swap the larger drive itself into the PCMCIA interface portion of the smaller drive? I know it would be taller, but both of his slots are open. Does anyone know if there are technological barriers to this hack?"

Comments

pcmcia supports IDE

[Naikrovek]

if he's not going to take the drive anywhere, just backup nightly, I believe there are PCMCIA -> IDE adapters that can do the job.

I know you mentioned INTERNAL drives but you'll likely pay through the nose for a drive like that.. try and find an adapter to the PCMCIA bridge and you'll have better success i think.

laptop drive on a usb2 external drive

[infonography]

Got one off eBay for about $15, hot swappable and very portable. I put in a 6 gig that I bought used for under $10. This one runs off the USB port so there isn't any messy power cordage.

ipod

[spooky_nerd]

Why not use an ipod? Yes, it is external, but you have a 20 or 40 GB hard drive for backing up data, and you can listen to music.

Re:Hmm

[Glonoinha]

How about Ghost the entire drive with everything installed, then make backups of his My Documents directory to a 1G USB thumbdrive. He keeps it in his pocket or drawer when he isn't doing a backup (takes care of separating the backup from the machine) and it is a no-brainer to keep his backup fresh. The 1G USB thumbdrives are cheap enough to get a few to rotate between backups for keeping a few versions in case he backs up a corrupt version of a file over a good version.