Why all the fuss?

For years now, you have been able to do this Compact Flash cards. One of their operating modes imitates an IDE drive. All you need is a passive IDE to CF adapter (available on eBay at very reasonable prices) and you can hook it up to your PC. Many embedded PCs go this route and my home PC happily runs Windows 2K off a 2 gigabyte CF card plugged directly into the motherboard. And very nippy it is too!