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FedEx apparently showed up yesterday while we were at lunch, leaving me a little brown and yellow sticky note on my door. Today, as promised, they returned - the two IDE to Compact Flash adapters arrived finally! They stuck me with a $22.60 CAD import fee, on top of the $16 USD shipping - total price, about $60 USD total...
The adapters come mounted in a 3.5" drive bay enclosure:
Sorry for the quality of the pics, btw - I don't have a proper camera, so I'm taking them with my Treo 650. :)
I figured I didn't really need to keep the readers in the drive bays, as I'll be mounting them internally anyway - and looking closer, I see a couple of interesting-looking mount-points on the case chassis anyway... you can see them in this pic: 
I removed the logic boards from the 3.5" drive chassis, and removed the drive bay from the case, and found that the mounting holes in the CF readers weren't *quite* perfectly matched with the mount points in the chassis, so me and my trusty dremel tool had a little go at them, and carved out the mounting holes a little bit to make them fit. 
In my box of random misc.comp.shite collected over the years, I tracked down a couple of brass motherboard risers and some cardboard insulator washers, stuck 'em all together, and presto! 
The CF readers are now installed, and have power. Unfortunately, I do not have a spare 40-conductor IDE cable lying around (how is this possible? it seems like just last week that's *all* I had, and I had to go to the store to buy 80-conductor cables. now I have five spare 80-pin cables and no 40-pin!), so I'll have to add that to the next run to the computer store. The docs for the CF readers say that a 40-pin cable is *necessary* if I don't want problems.
Talking it over with my friend Emerson, who is visiting from London and staying in our basement, some questions remain:
How can I configure and boot a RAID1 across two CF cards under Windows XP? It'd be trivial in Linux, but Windows is kind of lame when it comes to this kind of stuff.CF cards have a finite lifespan of about 300,000 writes - obviously I won't want to store the swapfile on the cards, but the RAMdrive driver that comes with XP can only handle a 32-meg RAMdrive... how can I get the swapfile into RAM?Will it be better to have the cards setup as master/slave, or master on two different IDE controllers? Will it matter?I know the seek time on CF cards is WAY faster than regular drives, but what's the sustained streaming data rate like? How will this translate over to how fast the computer will boot from CF?What *is* the average landspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow, anyway?Soon these questions will be answered - the motherboard is due to arrive on July 19th. I still have yet to select a processor (I know it'll be a P4, but I'm not sure what the max the motherboard can handle, vs. the price-to-performance ratio, vs. cooling), and I still need RAM for the thing.
It's a shame that it's taking so long to come together. The Trancemission 9 gig is coming up on the 22nd, so I have to spend the rest of the weekend working on my set for that... and sometime between now and the show at the Lotus Long Weekend last month, I managed to do something to my set that is causing major audio glitches due to overloading the CPU and running out of RAM. I have a long weekend of debugging ahead of me, and the new PC could likely have spared me the trouble, but even though it should technically be finished in time for the show, I have absolutely no intention of bringing an untested machine into battle!
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