I know I have seen baby AT i0 shields before, but I can't remember where. You can buy blank IO shields and just cut out a hole with a box cutter. That is definitely the cheapest option.

relevant thread:
Where can I get an IO shield for a Baby AT board?

There are many ways to do swappable storage. The most common are compact flash to ide adapters where you plug in the compact flash card into the expansion bay. I think you can also find some that route through a 5.25 bay as well. I would suggest instead that you go with an SD card solution, only because compact flash is a pretty dead medium (although it is certainly not hard to find 8gb compact flash cards for cheap though, and they do tend to work without much fuss).

Another option is to get an IDE to SATA adapter and use something like a small 2.5 SSD drive. Most socket 7 boards are limited to about 32 gb of storage due to a bios limitation, but that is plenty of storage for DOS and windows 9x. Windows 98 has support for up to 128gb drives on a single partition, which I what I use for all but my oldest DOS machines. Fast storage and no swapping required. You can configure windows to boot straight to DOS if you prefer.

Thanks for the response.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-01-03, 16:45:

I know I have seen baby AT i0 shields before, but I can't remember where. You can buy blank IO shields and just cut out a hole with a box cutter. That is definitely the cheapest option.

relevant thread:
Where can I get an IO shield for a Baby AT board?

Yeah cutting a hole is a last resort, but it wouldn't be a preferred solution. I'd like to find a proper I/O shield.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-01-03, 16:45:

There are many ways to do swappable storage. The most common are compact flash to ide adapters where you plug in the compact flash card into the expansion bay. I think you can also find some that route through a 5.25 bay as well.

I've actually been looking like crazy for a 5.25" bay one that is white and isn't 3D printed, but there doesn't seem to be any. The only one I can find is a black 2.5" one, but I have limited floppy slots so that isn't a preferred solution unfortunately.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-01-03, 16:45:

I would suggest instead that you go with an SD card solution, only because compact flash is a pretty dead medium (although it is certainly not hard to find 8gb compact flash cards for cheap though, and they do tend to work without much fuss).

Wouldn't CF be best given that there are SD adapters for CF? That way you'd cover all formats.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-01-03, 16:45:

Another option is to get an IDE to SATA adapter and use something like a small 2.5 SSD drive. Most socket 7 boards are limited to about 32 gb of storage due to a bios limitation, but that is plenty of storage for DOS and windows 9x. Windows 98 has support for up to 128gb drives on a single partition, which I what I use for all but my oldest DOS machines. Fast storage and no swapping required. You can configure windows to boot straight to DOS if you prefer.

I'd prefer something easily swappable, so I won't have to open up my case that often.

quackgyver wrote on 2021-01-03, 15:42:

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My questions are:

1. If possible I'd prefer to be able to regularly switch out the storage device without having to open the case, so instead of having an internal HDD, could I instead use one of the optical drive bays for a hot swap drive? Would an item like this or this work for my purposes and with my hardware? If I bought one of these hot swap drives, could I plug a regular 3.5" HDD into the optical bay and use it as my primary HDD?

Those swappable bays are a perfectly good idea - and you can combine with CF cards, just put the adapter in the drive holder. You might even be able to put an IDE-SATA adapter and a 2.5" HDD/SSD in one.

Note
[*]If the above mentioned option isn't viable, could I instead have some sort of front-facing USB/flash drive or SD drive in the optical bay or floppy bay? If so, what product should I get more specifically that would work with my hardware?

You could look for a multi card reader, they have CF and SD too. Onboard USB1.1 performance will be horrendous though, so only contemplate this if you add a USB 2.0 card. Only cards with NEC chip are likely to work on the old PCI 2.1 bus on the board. Note that even then, chances are you can't boot from USB on this board, so it would only be good for file sharing. I'd thoroughly recommend a network card and FTP for that rather than messing around with cards...

[*]Instead of a floppy drive, could I have a USB/flash drive in the floppy bay that uses FAT-formatted USB/flash drives instead of floppy disks? I know that Gotek has produced floppy emulators that can read disk images from USB/flash drives, but I would prefer to read the data straight from the USB/flash drive rather than from an image file located on the USB/flash drive. Does anyone know if this is possible, and what product I should get?

Not under DOS afaik, but with correct drivers it would work under Win98SE. Again, I'd recommend network over cards for file transfer.

[*]My specific motherboard only seems to have a DIM keyboard port, which means that I need an I/O shield that is completely solid except for a single DIM keyboard port hole. I've been looking on eBay, Aliexpress, Discord chats, forums and Facebook groups, but I haven't been able to find one yet. 3D printing or drilling isn't an option due to lack of hardware and the amount of back and forth/trial and error that it'd require if I got help from someone else, and I'd prefer not to put a piece of paper or tape over it. Does anyone know where I could find such an I/O shield?

Very hard to get. Note that your board does have a lot more ports, just in header form.