RAID on the Cheap: Windows 7 Software RAID

Here's an idea - if you have two old but similarly sized hard drives sitting around, plug them into your Windows 7 PC and create a Striped Volume.

Striping increases the access speed of the drive.

This could be useful when working on a local version of a Revit central file - local disk access speed becomes important in this situation.

Here's how:

1. Plug the two extra hard drives into your PC.  Then turn the computer on...
2. Go to Disk Management (right click on 'Computer', then go 'Manage')
3. Delete all unnecessary volumes from these extra drives.
4. Right click on one of them - New - Striped Volume
5. Basically follow the prompts - make sure you pick the two correct drives to become part of the Striped configuration.
6. Choose quick format / NTFS Default allocation size
7. Enjoy the increased speed of your striped volume.

Please be careful with this process - make sure you understand the pro's and con's.  If you do, it can be a inexpensive way to increase your performance while using Revit.

This guy did a comparison on the speed of Windows 7 'Striping' vs hardware RAID0 - and surprisingly, the results were similar.
RAID on the Cheap: Windows 7 Software RAID vs. inexpensive “fake RAID” � Kevin’s Blog