CF to ide adapter

thinking about using one of these for an always on internet box using new atom cpu/motherboard. never used one before so any advice would be most appreciated

Windows or Linux?

There are two types of CF module, ones that can appear as fixed disks and ones that appear as removable media in Windows. Windows can only boot from the former and not the latter.

SanDisk Extreme cards are always set to be removable dirves, to the basic passive CF -> IDE adapters just show them as they are meant to be. You do get more expensive adapters that mask this though. There are also tools you can get the change the bit setting letting you use SanDisk cards to run Windows.

Linux has no problem and will let you boot from virtualy anything.

Most likely i will be using linux to keep the size down. Has anyone bought an ad apter that they can recommend?

The passive adapters are much and much the same really, they are just a holder for the card.

It's the card you want to pay attention to. Idealy you want one that us UDMA capable. Normal cheap cards are PIO Mode 4, which means you take a big performance hit whenever you access them as it hogs the CPU.

A way round any performance problems would be to have a disk image on the card that creates a RAM drive, copies the contents into it then continues to boot in RAM. This i how bootable linux CDs work. I don't know how you do thins, only that it is possible :)

I believe the A-data cards are the favourites for using as flash drives in a PC.

Here is a guide that might be useful:
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/Article_CFMCE.html

i'm sure there are dozens of similar guides going around if you have a hunt.