This product from New Egg listed below is a 2.5" PATA SSD drive. It's $97 (but it's 32Gig). This should be a 1:1 replacement with no modding since it's designed to be a 1:1 repalcement for a laptop IDE drive. If you go this route, you can have 64Gig of solid state memory for under $200.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208445

I haven't seen CF cards above 12 gig for less than $200 a piece.

The only thing I wasn't happy about was the 25M read / 8M write, but I'm not sure if that matters for the EMPEG player.

64G for $200 (and never having to buy another set of hard drives)... I'm sold!