IDE/pATA to USB? 2.5"

Hello, I have a compaq nx7000 laptop and the hard drive has been making some odd sounds over the past few months like clicking, banging, clunking, hissing and various other sounds.
So I presume it's slowly dying and will need replacing at some unknown time in the future. I was looking about on the net at replacements in both traditional and SSD type drives and both are a bit costly, I don't want to spend to much on such an old machine.

My question is do they do a 2.5" IDE to USB adapter that would fit in the place of the hard drive so I could plug in a USB pen drive to install Linux(or any OS) to? This would be great as I don't need speed or huge capacity as I only use this machine for email, posting to forums, reading a few PDF's etc and I have a lot of pendrives. I have found an adapter to use compact flash cards in this way but not to USB.
I cant find anything like this just lots of hard drive to USB converters but not the other way around. I don't see any reason this couldn't be done, your thoughts?

 

Hi,

I'm not clear on exactly what the adapter you are looking for would look like. Could you try to explain it again?

One thought if you were only looking for Linux, is that it can be run off a USB flash drive with no need for a HD if the laptop will boot from USB. Something like Lili will allow you to use Persistence which will remember you settings like bookmarks etc. So if you had say a 16gb flash drive then 2gb would go to Linux and say you set persistence to 2-4gb to allow installing extra programs that would still leave you 12gb for storage.