Thank you, that's more or less what I was looking for. I had probably come across it during my earlier attempts at finding a suitable project, but the need for

Thank you, that's more or less what I was looking for. I had probably come across it during my earlier attempts at finding a suitable project, but the need for an FPGA likely turned me a bit down. I might re-evaluate that if I really need it. I also bought a SD Card -> IDE adapter some time ago. SD cards can communicate via SPI, so it should be feasible to directly hook up a raspberry pi (after writing a host SD card protocol layer), unless I am missing something? More recent Pi version should be able to drive the SPI link at more than 25 MHz, I hear.