The difference, if measurable, between CF and SATA on a polled I/O SCSI bus on a 16 MHz m68030 is going to be so insignificant as to be noise.

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Pure speculation until I see actual benchmarks. Benchmarks are very easy too. Most of us have a copy of Norton Utilities, which includes a benchmarking program. There were also other popular benchmarking apps for 68k Macs.

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No, not pure speculation - it's observation, although not observation specific to the SE/30. Take, for instance, the Amiga 3000. For quite a while it had the fastest SCSI bus of any non-Unix workstation and was used to benchmark drives. It's much faster than the SE/30's SCSI bus because it supports real DMA, has a FIFO to allow for 32 bit bus transfers and can even be persuaded to do synchronous mode. When I compared an 80 gig 7200 RPM 3.5" IDE drive on a SCSI to IDE adapter with a 250 gig 5400 RPM 2.5" SATA drive in an Acard SATA to SCSI adapter, there was no measurable difference. There was more of a variability between individual tests than there was between the different drives.

I'll let you know how things go when I compare the CF card with the SCSI-SATA.