D975XBX2, Raid, Velociraptors failing

[Bookseller]

Have a D975XBX2 with quad Q6600, normally clocked, 4GB, generally works great even if a bit dated. Very stable, running Vista.

I had a drive failure, and decided to add a pair of 300GB Velociraptors from WD as Raid-1 for system drive.

First drive in pair, on port zero, keeps failing. No specific error, hangs, degrades. Mark normal, comes back. After a half dozen times, RMA'd it, installed new, rebuilt. Did a full checkdisk twice, defragged fully (to exercise), checkdisked again, ran for a week, and returned old drive.

Two days later it goes degraded again, same drive position (port 0). Rebuild. Later in the day same thing.

Firmware? (Running 2838, am I correct that upgrades the intel raid as well?)

Bad port? Unfortunately I have another pair of drives mirrored, so no really easy way to test that.

Anyone use this MB with Velociraptors in a raid-1 config, maybe they are not compatible?

Or can someone suggest a good PCI raid controller, I do not so much care if I debug this, as just get it stable.

[bluedragon9r]

There's a known problem with the velociraptors in RAID0 and the Intel ICH9R and 10R chipsets. I ran this a while myself on a 9R, had a lot of problems, upgraded motherboards and ran into the exact same problem. I moved the drives to a Acrea raid controller and they worked perfectly. From what I have read on this, WD blames Intel, and Intel blames WD. Another forum topic on this with a lot of links:

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=732464

I ran mine on the Acrea for almost a year, then I upgrade to an SSD last week. 1 SSD is much faster then the VRs.