Concluding, now I'm not saying that a CF based SSD is fast enough to replace your current HDD, absolutely not. If anything the results shown today where a bit mediocre. I did expect to gain more overall performance from the RAID0 SSD setup. But this was merley a little test, something I was curious about.

On the other hand, what we achieved here to do today didn't disappoint either as it's ten times cheaper to manage compared to a professional SSD. There is a good reason why the more expensive SSD drives are costing more than 1000 USD, they are just much faster by utilizing the latest technology. Dual-channel setup, internal RAID Flash CF type 4.0 who knows what stunts they pull in these pro SDDs.

Fact is, for a fraction of the price we did manage to make a RAID-0 array with "decent" performance, Windows is heavily recommended. But as a primary drive, I'm afraid this solution is not yet fast enough. Especially since there are screamingly fast solid state drives available these days.

There are definitely alternative usage options you can consider though. Random access/seek time to a SDD  is extremely good as there are no moving parts in the SDD opposed to the HDD. And what is the biggest annoyance with Windows ? Exactly, the constant HD swapping causing a lot of delays due to accumulating activity versus seek times.

You could use it really well as Windows temp directory or swap file ..  for fast file transfers of big files, obviously you'll need to stick to your usual HD, or indeed that 1200 USD SSD. Then again, a fast flash-disk could help you out there as well. But one thing is a fact, we can achieve pretty decent results with a self made SSD of 70 EUR (including flash), and when you spend roughly 150 EUR, go with the RAID controller and two fast CFs, then things get more interesting instantly as you can go for a 64 GB SDD. When we look purely at the CF to IDE converter with "standard CFs", we noticed slightly slower speeds. But if you plug 2x 32GB on a mobile IDE converter and use it on an average laptop, you might actually enjoy it and preserve a lot of power as these SDDs roughly consume 1.5 Watt.

But surely for our first try, this is a nice experiment. And as far as I'm concerned .. to be continued.