Raid 5 setup

First of all you have to have all 4 hdds migrated from BASIC to DYNAMIC disks. Once you did that (from My computer > Manage > Disk Management), if you click on one unformated disk and you choose Create Volume and then you follow the instructions on the wizard that appears.
You can have RAID5 on all the 4 disks or only on 3 (but not less than 3).

Before you go trying to do software-based RAID, you should look at the rest of the hardware in your computer.

- What processor does the machine have?
- How much memory does it have?
- Does the motherboard support RAID 5 natively?

Unless you have a fairly fast machine, doing software RAID is a bad idea. I'd strongly suggest picking up a SCSI RAID card (Adaptec makes lots of them) that has a decent amount of cache memory.

In my system, I put the operating system on either a single drive or a mirrored pair, and the data goes on the RAID 5 array of 3 disks or more. From WIndows' point of view, the RAID array looks like one big disk and you don't have to devote any processor time to make the RAID work.