RAID 0 Woes

[RICHARDHHEEREN]

I have built a new system around an ABIT IC7-G Max II motherboard which has an onboard Silicon Image RAID Controller. I am using this RAID controller with two identical Western Digital Caviar Serial ATA 250GB, 7200RPM, 8MB Cache hard drives. When I configure the Silicon Image RAID Controller to a RAID 1 configuration, I have no problems with the disk array created, in or with any Windows XP Pro application. However, when I configure the Silicon Image RAID Controller to a RAID 0 configuration, I have all kinds of problems reading and writing files to this disk array, even with Windows Explorer trying to copy files to or from it. Could a RAID 1 disk array work okay if one of the hard disks was bad or if there is a bad SATA cable connection between the Silicon Image RAID Controller and one of the hard disks? What could cause only RAID 0 config to fail, but RAID 1 config to still work fine? Are there any diagnostic programs available that would help me to figure out what is causing my RAID 0 config array to fail? Thanks for any help you can provide!

Richard H. Heeren