1) Funny thing is that I bought one of those PCMCIA CF adapters the other day. (That exact model.) What it does is more less connect the card as an IDE device. CF is supposed to be compatible with IDE. And sadly, some of the cheaper cards are not fully compatible and will not work. (They will just freeze the computer for as long as you have the card inserted.) It's a bit of a hit and miss. (However, cards that are not compatible with that adapter are likely not compatible with the Amiga either.)
But there's one more consideration. Since the card appears as an IDE device, DMA transfers might or might not work depending on the controller on your motherboard. If they don't, you're in for some slow transfers.
Conclusion: Get a USB->CF adapter.
2) Yes.
3) I can't judge what speed you need, but I can inform you that the speeds listed as "x" (133x, 266x etc) are read speeds compared to CD. In other words, number * 150 kBytes/s. So a 133x card, will give you about 20 MB/s under good conditions.
4),5) I'll leave these to someone else.
General comment, though: Hard disks fail based how long time they've been on and spinning. CF cards fail based on how many times you write to them. If you keep cycling the content on them, they'll wear out eventually, but if you mostly just read from them, they'll last forever, where a spinning disk would eventually fail.
Last edited by nitro2k01 (Sep 15, 2010 2:45 am)