--On 06 May 2005 23:12 +0200, Joerg Lenneis wrote:
Instead I would like to use a USB stick for mass storage, since they are a bit cheaper than equivalent IDE flash drives but more importantly, they can easily be pulled out and for instance swapped with another stick with patches, upgrades or a newer version of the OS.
You might want to try a CompactFlash card and a CF-IDE adapter. It will need +5v (typically taken from a floppy drive connector). The adapters are passive devices, just connecting the CF pins over to IDE pins, so they are quite cheap, and the cards themselves should be cheaper than sticks.
There's no hotswap on a CF-IDE adapter, but coldswap is simple (especially if you arrange for the CF to be mounted through a hole in the case or similar: some of the cases designed for mini-itx boxes have thought about this and it can work out much neater than having a stick sitting completely outside the case).
