[quote="conrad10781"]
Quote Originally Posted by garyng
Quote Originally Posted by conrad10781

A 2.5" IDE USB 2.0 DISK enclosure. less bulky than the above and similar to your idea. This means I need to borrow machines. The advantage(comparing with yours) is that I have all my stuff with me(20G is quite some space, much larger than a CD, even DVD) and don't need a network.


This was thrown around the most when we were suggesting USB Flash Keys, and the original idea of the whole distro.. again only prob we had was we would have to have so many variations of the distro, because we would have to have one for USB Hard Drive Enclosure, one for cd, some with boot disks etc.

The only reason I bring this one up, is because we are going to probably still be pushing this as a 2nd option. Either the CD carry version or 2.5" portable. But let me ask you. Who would want to pay as much as you would have to (at least $100) to get the hardware, when it seems the biggest complaint is the cost of everything?

I know you weren't bashing either, sorry for any inconvenience.
Um,

I can have a 2.5" enclosure for 8US. I can grab a 3-8G 2.5" HD from a used notebook(the very old one) for almost free. A 256MB flash is selling like may be 20 US and a 512MB is far from 100. At your rate of 5/month, I can balance it for one year of usage. I see a net saving starting from year 2. Beside, I get 512MB flash which I can used for other things if I find it to be no longer needed. If I choose CF rather than keychain, I can use it in my digital camera.

A mini-CD + keychain version is all that is needed. Both CD and keychain can be bootable. USB enclosure is not different than a keychain technical wise. Put syslinux on the keychain as well as USB IDE disk so it is bootable if the machine support it. If the machine can only boot from CD, it can be used as the hosting device for KNOPPIX. This way, I only need to store a 1.44MB boot image on the CD which makes mini-CD by all means possible.