I wouldn't go with an HDD. I'd go with some sort of SSD/Flash based storage. There's DIY SDD adapters that let you put a CF card into a 1.8" drive slot, or 6 SD cards into a 1.8" drive slot. I'd go with one of those. Though, I'm not sure what's currently a good MB/s rate for that kind of thing (I want lower power than the HDD, but still at least HDD speeds, if not faster ... you know, the holy grail of SSDs ;-) ). But, you can get a CF card -> 1.8" drive adapter for $30ish, and a 32GB CF card for $100ish.

I've seen an adapter that says CF cards get up to 40MB/s, and I saw an SSD that does 36ish. Not sure what's normal for a laptop/iPod SSD though.

For the CherryPal though, you wouldn't use the 1.8" drive adapter, you'd just have a USB CF card reader. That should be a bit cheaper than $30. An ideal companion to something like the CherryPal would be a device that had an internal battery for powering itself and the CherryPal, so one connector to the cherrypal's power port ... and then also had a connector into the CherryPal's USB ports that provided 2 SDHC card slots, a CF card slot, and an ExpressCard slot.

Though, I also wish the CherryPal had a DVI (with DVI-A) interface instead of VGA. VGA is like having a PCMCIA card slot these days ;-)


As for OS ... Debian is MORE than acceptable for an in-backpack server. It doesn't need the pretty UI of Ubuntu or Maemo. I probably wouldn't even install X on it, if i didn't have to.