Today I came across and installed four extra drives and was going to establish a RAID-5 (striping with a parity disk) array across them for the storage of WSUS update content. Unfortunately, the "New RAID-5 Volume" option in Disk Management was grayed out. I couldn't understand why until I tried using DiskPart's create volume raid and got the following message:
"The command you selected is not available with this version of Windows."
After some research, I discovered that only the Server family of Windows operating systems support RAID-5. That's really a shame, because it's actually a Windows Server VM that the storage was destined for. VMware supports the use of a volume on the host, but not a raw disk; VirtualBox doesn't support mounting a volume on the host and only supports raw disk access with some command-line trickery that seems scary to me.
I would go with the tricky command line stuff if I actually cared about the data going on the volume, but it's just the WSUS update cache, and I can easily get that again from Microsoft update servers if something breaks. I ended up using a spanned volume to maximize the usefulness of the one extra large drive in the array.
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