I just read an article where someone using vista ultimate used a software raid feature accessed through disk managment to make a rasid 0 array of non bootable drives. I can't seem to see that feature in my XP home edition or Vista Premium. Will this featrure be present in Windows 7 and in which versions? Also I am wondering if it would be possible to raid0 a number of software Ram disks (superspeed ramdisk 10+ software) using this feature of the OS?

Technogiant - If you're referring to the product from this web site, I'm sure you can use it... They do claim to be compatible with Windows 7. But I'm completely at a loss as to how or why you'd want to RAID a RAM disk..? RAID is for combining multiple, phyisical drives in various ways for speed and/or security. A RAMdisk is a portion of physical memory that's been allocated as a temporary drive. As long as you have enough spare RAM, if you need a bigger RAM drive, just resize it. I'm not thinking you're going to get much of a boost in performance by RAIDing them together.

Yes that is the software I was refering to...I understand it is compatible with windows 7. What I was uncertain about was which version of win 7 has this software raid feature accessible via disk managment as it doesn't seem to be present in XP Home ed or vista Premium. (have only seen it on Vista Ultimate in this article:- http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/x25-e-ssd-performance,2365-5.html ) And secondly if present would it work with a software/virtual drive. I know you can resize a ramdisk but want to see if using raid0 with several would increase performance. PS I've been reading around futher and believe the OS feature I'm am talking about is called "Dynamic Disk support". It is only supported in some versions of XP and Vista...can anyone tell me which version if any of windows 7 will support it?

technogiant -I don't believe any version of Windows 7 comes with this feature. If memory serves me- RAID features are generally limited to Windows Server products only.As far as RAIDing a RAMdrive... It would seem to me to be a waste of energy to do so. Yes, you likely can, but there's no really good reason to do it...

I'm sure you are right about the benefit or otherwise of raiding a set of ramdisks...but I just wanted to experiment with that. But you're not correct about the OS support for software raid / dynamic disks which ever it is called...it is available in XP Professional and Vista Ultimate (see article I mentioned above) as well as server version OS's. I've also seen people refering to it's use in the beta releases of WIN 7.....but I think the beta release was of the Ultimate version wasn't it.....just hoping it will be available on cheaper versions.

I've downloaded and have been trying the RC of win 7 both 32 and 64 bit....they are of the ultimate edition...and both have the dynamic disk feature....just go into the diskmanagment page and right click on the disc number. I tried this using superspeeds trial ramdisk software....problem was that each time I tried to convert the ramdisks to dynamic disks I got the error message not enough space on disk to convert to dynamic disk or something similar. I don't have enough ram installed to make them any bigger....I was wondering if anyone knows the minimum size of disk required or space required to convert it to a dynamic disk?

Reading some more on dynamic disks I see that you can only convert a basic disc to a dynamic disk if it has a Master Boot record. If it is not present you get the above error....I presume the software ramdisk does not have one.....is there anyway I can put one on there so I can do this?

Here's my experience with an emulated hard disk, or RamDiskThis particular RamDisk approach should not be confused with various XP generation ramdisk schemes.And would, additional to performance improvement, address SSD drive "wear" concerns. The advantages of this next described emulated hard disk are Microsoft "Certified for Windows Vista" and "Designed for Windows XP", that this ramdisk scheme can address on (many) 32bit PCs the 4-8GB range, the RamDisk emulated device(s) are available at bootup, data content carry-over until next bootup option, and have your assigned drive letters. I've just completed installing on a Vista 32bit SP2 Home Premium PC, with Intel DG965WH motherboard, having a Windows Experience Index base score of 5.3 (the cpu is the slow component)the following add-in components: 8GB DDR2-800 memory, a 500MB RamDisk I.E. temp file, and a 3000MB RamDisk page file,the latter two using the "RamDisk10 Plus" product. The RamDisk software features can be reviewed at http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php The setup-install was straight forward. The resultant performance improvement is just phenomenal -- more so than speculated and planned on. Most EVERY click/command response is now lightning fast, along with I/O bound commands substantially improved. Competent SuperSpeed phone support staff are available.The motivation simply is due to upcoming devices coming available near-term: 6Gb/s eSATA, USB3, SSD, etc. So for the time being, extending this current PC performance is a preferred choice, until future motherboards with these essentially generational improvements, support the faster I/o devices.