Server drives tend to be very noisy. There is an appeal to a silent or nearly so machine, and a 15K drive whining away inside a compact Mac a couple feet from my head is not my idea of a good time. The benefit of going with IDE or other modern interface is the abundance of cheap SSD options. A 1GB SD card can be had for a few dollars and is more than enough space for most of these machines that originally came with <100MB drives. Not only that, CF, SD, and IDE drives are easily plugged into all manner of modern systems for data transfer.

I'm perfectly willing to contribute to projects but I'm primarily a hardware guy, the software/firmware side is over my head once it gets beyond 8 bit microcontrollers. I'm quite proficient at laying out PCBs so if there are projects awaiting that side of things I'd be happy to help out as time permits.

Does anyone know offhand what the IDE interface on the later 68k Macs looks like? Is it built out of commodity chips, or integrated into a big custom chip?

Also while I'm generally a fan of FPGAs, the more I look at the dual-AVR SCSI to PCMCIA/CF bridge, the more tempted I am to try it. The AVRs are cheap and expensive transceivers he used are not necessary for SE SCSI, it would be cheaper to use the discrete logic as used in the SCSI RAM disk. Too many projects and too little time.