I am thinking of taking advantage of the increased speed of a software raid array, with the help of converting to dynamic disks (through Computer Management/Disk Management in Administration Tools). My 2 hdds run at udma4 under winXP pro, the first one is a Maxtor 30Gb and the second one is a Quantum AS 40Gb.

I already know that I will loose my existing data, but will I be able to create virtual drives (eg. c: win, d: mp3, e: games and so on)?.

I would really like any help or thought on this, or if someone has already attempted this, some feedback would be more than appreciated.

A. You can't make a software stripe set in WinNT/2K using a system partition, and

B. You don't get that much of an improvement due to the overhead anyway.

I used it in NT 4 Server at home for a long time with my 3 4.3GB Western Digital harddrives so I could have a stripe set with parity (software RAID 5), but when I went to Win2K server it was noticably slower. If you have a system that has one boot drive, and 3 or more of the exact same drive for other files, then it might be worth your while. Mirroring (software RAID 1) has a good deal of overhead, and wouldn't be that hot either. Also, if these drives are sitting on the same IDE chain, then performance will be even worse since IDE doesn't support simultaneous read and write actions to multiple devices on the same chain.

Sorry to be a downer on it, but it isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

not to worry, thanks for the info....i'll think about it again!

Tom's Hardware had a good article on dynamic disks.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/01q3/010906/index.html