KT7AGuy wrote:

What are the advantages of using a CF card instead of a regular IDE hard drive? Isn't wear leveling an issue with operating systems earlier than Vista? Wouldn't the CF card wear out pretty quick under these conditions?

If you look around, you can easily find plenty of NOS and system-pulls of IDE HDDs. Used drives can also be found for dirt cheap.

Aside from concerns of mechanical failure, I suppose I don't see an advantage to using CF instead of a regular old HDD. Can anybody enlighten me?

Most CF cards have wear protection built in right out of the box that is passive and doesn't require any os level support. CF cards are meant for high performance cameras and some do have rather high demands so having wear protection built into the controller on the CF card is very important.