Anyway, I was considering redoing the entire thing with a larger CF card, but then I thought about a PATA SSD HD as it won't wear out.
SSDs use the same flash memory as CF cards and USB memory sticks, so I don't think they wear out less fast than CF cards.
So, my question, what is the best way to format this as far as OS, partitions, filesystems, etc?
Check other threads in this forum about using disks larger than 4GB. It's dangerous if you don't know what you are doing.