I picked up a Fujitsu Siemens S230 Transmeta Crusoe based thin client which seemed like it would be an interesting upgrade, or at least comparison, with an Igel VIA C3 600Mhz based one I already had. Killer features for me were built in power supply, and a PCI slot.

The Fujitsu motherboard has an onboard CF card slot (which came with a 128mb card) and a 40-pin IDE header (but no provision for drive power). But it seems that the CF card slot will only work with cards up to 4Gb (ParkyTowers site has some references to this, and 8Gb limit on the S400). Bigger CF cards are detected in the BIOS, and even show up in DOS (when booting from USB floppy or CD - no thumb drive support), but get all kinds of read and write errors.

This seems to be a weird limitation! I thought CF cards were pure IDE devices, so if this type of south bridge supports them on other boards, it must be a BIOS limitation here?

Is it worth trying larger drives via the IDE port? (if I solder up a 5V connection). Or is the 4Gb limit going to hit that way too?

The Igel unit has a very similar VIA VT8235 south bridge, and also a built in CF card slot, and a 44-pin IDE header. I was able to use any CF card (tested up to 32Gb) to boot from on that, and directly connect a 44-pin to SD card adapter with a 128Gb SD card.