The drive in it is probably Parallel ATA. Do they make PATA SSDs or adapters?
Possibly - may need to find an old one, but Compact flash is the same as IDE and you can definitely get IDE to CF adapters.
CF cards are terrible general hdd replacements, they dont have wear levelling and have abysmal random access / IOPS performance
they are ok'ish for bootstrapping custom linux, but you need to take special care not to write too much, and generally keep all the stuff in ramdisk.
cheapest/easiest solution (got one in my laptop) is :
http://www.ebay.com/itm/mSATA-SSD-to-44-Pin-IDE-Converter-Adapter-as-2-5-Inch-IDE-HDD-5-Volt-For-Laptop-/191196101500http://www.ebay.com/itm/mSATA-mini-PCI-E-SATA-SSD-to-2-5-IDE-44pin-Notebook-Laptop-hard-disk-case-White-/380893918084+ small mSATA SSD drive ( I got $25 32GB ADATA Sandforce one).
performance with that converter in older laptop:
Sequential Read : 78.959 MB/s
Sequential Write : 47.939 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 78.622 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 48.092 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 19.962 MB/s [ 4873.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 33.953 MB/s [ 8289.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 22.456 MB/s [ 5482.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 42.393 MB/s [ 10349.9 IOPS]
Maybe you can also replace the floppy drive by one of these (or similar):
its not a floppy, but a LS120 drive (120MB custom medium). Its not using floppy connector, but IDE one (slave to the main hdd)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDiskIf anything, it would be worth adding USB 2.0 PCI controller card (motherboard of that era has USB 1.1) and put USB connector in place/next to LS120.
Upgrading CPU and ram should also be easy and cheap and should bump performance (at least booting, maybe math).
Cant wait for scope teardown. Wonder how its build inside. Is data touching cpu at any point (FFTs?) Is it a PCI card or all one one custom motherboard? is it all in asic? What does the display, also asic or normal GPU of the day?