Compact Flash DOES work!!!
OK, so I finally received all my parts from Ebay. Total Spent = $10
(1) 1GB Compact Flash Chip
(1) Compact-Flash-2-IDE(40) adaptor
(1) Spare ATX power supply laying around...
Hooked up the original drive and the compact flash adapter to a spare pc laying around, and cloned the disk to the flash card.
Removed the power supply, fan, and hard drive and mounts from SVP-4 case and installed the compact flash adaptor. (See Pic)
No need for a fan, as the compact flash makes no significant heat. Nor do any of the chips on the motherboard itself.
Everything hooked back up and working! Don't forget you'll need a little bit longer IDE cable to reach over where I put the adapter.
On a side note, anyone who is familiar with the boot-up process can see that after the system boots and runs scandisk, it begins a sort of maintenance on the mailboxes. With a regular hard-drive, this only takes a few moments, and is generally very quick.
However, the compact flash drive moves very quickly throughout the bootup process until it gets to that maintenance mode. It takes a long time to complete (appx 5 minutes for my 5 mailbox system) but it does finish and loads normally. The system does not hang, and the drive is showing activity.
I'll write again when this has been running a few days to remark on reliability.
Ryan