I noticed Toshiba offers a 120GB IDE hard drive in a nominal "1.8 inch" package. Cool. It seems to have a reasonable price for such a tiny box.

I've noticed adapters that would let me plug this HDD into a normal laptop "2.5 inch" hard drive slot (and even boot from it). Other adapters convert to a "3.5 inch" bay size and cable. Cooler.

I've seen adapters--if I read the ad right--that convert the "1.8 inch" drive to a Compact Flash plug (for use in an iPod maybe?). That's cool, too.

Now, what would be REALLY cool is if there were an adapter that would allow me to plug one of these tiny hard drives into the PCMCIA / Cardbus slot on my Dell Latitude C510 laptop. --And then have Linux be able to read and write it, of course.

No, I don't mean an external drive enclosure plugged into a PCMCIA USB adapter. (Which, itself, rates fairly high on the cool scale.) I mean internal to the cardbus slot--as in doesn't stick out of the laptop much.

Does anybody know of such an adapter?

If there's no such thing, and you happen to be in the business of designing PCMCIA adapters: HINT, HINT! Thanks.

Yes, I had been looking for such kind of connects myself too but failed. Incidentally, these 1.8" drives (PATA or ZIF) type have very tiny pins therefore any slightly wrong fitting of the cable to the connectors (e.g. slanted etc) would cause the connector on the drive to get burnt. I've seen these burnt drives myself before. Its better to get a proper PCMCIA HDD instead which is already EOL in the market. Next stop, PCIExpress SSD (seen 32GB & 64GB from Taiwanese mfgrs).