Mini ITX boards and flash memory

SlickShughes

So, I'm thinking of building a mini-pc, as a sort-of media PC EDIT the second (removed, per rules), play cds/dvds, maybe surf the web. The whole thing is inspired (well, flat out copied) from something someone mentioned in the Building Stuff thread in D&D - fitting a PC in a hollowed out NES. Here are my issues:

1. What should I look for in a mini-itx board? A cursory search at newegg and ebay shows a wide range of prices and features, the only one that I know I'll need is s-vid or composite out.

2. I've seen a few walkthroughs on the construciton of these, and it seems the biggest pain will be fitting a laptop hard drive in there. If I've got no concern about storing alot of media on it, would a large flash drive work for this?

3. Assuming 2. above, I'll need a small-ish OS to install on it. Any recomendations?

EDIT the second (removed, per rules)

(EDIT the third - fixed title to reflect current content)

Monolithic_Dome

2. SD card reader would be better as you could hot-swap and/or expand the storage as SD cards come down in price

3. You are going to want linux. Puppy Linux is a particularly good distro at running on anything and actually being usable.

SlickShughes

Monolithic_Dome wrote: »

Note: you might want to remove any explicit references to things that are prohibited by the rules.

On rereading of the rules, you are correct. My original request was (I thought) in a legal grey area, but the rules thread is clear on this, so I've excised the offending portion. I'm still curious about the rest though.

Monolithic_Dome wrote: »

2. SD card reader would be better as you could hot-swap and/or expand the storage as SD cards come down in price

Perhaps a combination: USB drive running the OS, SD card reader to expand storage as needed?

Monolithic_Dome

Yeah that would probably be best. That way you don't have to reinstall the OS if you want to up the storage.

Looking at #1 I'd say you definitely want Gigabit ethernet (for streaming media/files from places) and you want to make sure that it will boot a USB stick, which I'd imagine every motherboard does these days.

AtomBomb

I thought about doing this before, and I don't think fitting a laptop hdd in there would be that hard. I would just find a place to put it. I was going to do this 6 or 7 years ago. Stuff is so much smaller now it shouldn't be that hard.

When I was thinking of doing something similar I was going to put some of the stuff in a ROB robot (or any other peripheral really) to save space. Makes it harder to move around, but you can fit more stuff in there.

amateurhour

I'm the one who posted about putting the mobo in the nes case.

Check out mini-itx.com and epiacenter (google it) for your motherboard specs.

Some of the newer mini itx boxes have sd slots on them, others you'll need an ATA/IDE to SD converter.

They can easily run XP with no problem, and it's what a lot of people end up using.

Just PM Me if you've got any questions about which board to buy.

SlickShughes

amateurhour wrote: »

They can easily run XP with no problem, and it's what a lot of people end up using.

I know they can run XP, but I was thinking about saving space by not using a HDD, and while I suppose you could put XP on a flash drive given a large enough one, I don't know if it's worth the cost of a drive that size.