i'm in the process of buy an 8 channel ide raid card and some ide to compact flash adaptors, as well as some cf cards that are supposed to be 36mb write and 40mb read speed (280x). since i'll be plugging the raid card in a regular pci slot, i'm not sure how much bandwith i can actually have for the raid card.
 
basicly i have 2 questions:
 
1. what's the maximum bandwidth to a raid card in a pci slot (on an asus m2a-vm)
2. what's the minimum disk size for vista 64/ server 2008 if all the default paths for documents and programs are on a different disk. (swap file would be 6gb on the compact flash drive, hibernate disabled)
 
also, you're all welcomed to make comments and suggest other ideas

I dont have anything geared towards your two questions, but its my understanding that without some certain algorithms to spread the write cycles around the CF cards, you will wear them out very quickly.

i really hadn't taught about wear.... i guess they can always be ran in raid 5 then? or maybe raid 10 would be safer. at anyrate the cf cards i was looking at claim something about being ecc.