Which 120gig 8mb cache SATA drives are best for RAID (on Gigaraid controller)?

I'm looking to configure SATA RAID (striped) array for my Gigabyte
GA-KVT800 Pro motherboard (Via K8T800 chipset for Athlon 64 with a
Gigaraid IT8212 chipset).

So far the only real experience I've had with the Gigaraid controller
was on a Gigabyte GA-7N400PRO2 board on which we put two identical
Western Digital 80gig 8mb cache drives (PATA) in a striped RAID
config. The user had a corruption problem and reformatted the drive
(as an attempt to fix that corruption) but it never worked properly
after that - removing each drive and testing them individually
detected a repairable sector problem but the concern was that there
was a sync problem with the drives of some sort

Looking at the Western Digital site we found mention of an obscure
problem with acoustic management functions switching in for one drive
and not the other potentially causing problems and a "BIOS update" to
fix the problem that seemed to do nothing (but we've no had the
problem since then on that system, so far at least anyway; the BIOS
upgrade seemed inconclusive as we think the drives had that BIOS
anyway).


Of course I'd like to avoid that kind of problem with my system -
currently I'm wondering what drives are best to use on my board's SATA
array. I want to get 2 identical drives, 120gig in size with 8mb of
cache and 3 year warranty on them, my priorities in order of
importance a

1. Reliability (really important but I will be backing up all
data daily to another volume)
2. performance (sustained tfr and seek)
3. low thermal output (my cooling's ok but I tend to like cooler
drives)
4. acoustic performance (it's nice to have them quiet but not as
important as reliability)

Can anyone recommend which drives in that category tend to best suit
those attributes? I was tending towards the Seagate ST3120026AS but I
have seen some mention of RAID writing problems with them (I'm not
entirely sure about this though).

Thanks


DT

"Davo-CC" wrote in message
...
I'm looking to configure SATA RAID (striped) array for my Gigabyte
GA-KVT800 Pro motherboard (Via K8T800 chipset for Athlon 64 with a
Gigaraid IT8212 chipset).

So far the only real experience I've had with the Gigaraid controller
was on a Gigabyte GA-7N400PRO2 board on which we put two identical
Western Digital 80gig 8mb cache drives (PATA) in a striped RAID
config. The user had a corruption problem and reformatted the drive
(as an attempt to fix that corruption) but it never worked properly
after that - removing each drive and testing them individually
detected a repairable sector problem but the concern was that there
was a sync problem with the drives of some sort

Looking at the Western Digital site we found mention of an obscure
problem with acoustic management functions switching in for one drive
and not the other potentially causing problems and a "BIOS update" to
fix the problem that seemed to do nothing (but we've no had the
problem since then on that system, so far at least anyway; the BIOS
upgrade seemed inconclusive as we think the drives had that BIOS
anyway).


Of course I'd like to avoid that kind of problem with my system -
currently I'm wondering what drives are best to use on my board's SATA
array. I want to get 2 identical drives, 120gig in size with 8mb of
cache and 3 year warranty on them, my priorities in order of
importance a

1. Reliability (really important but I will be backing up all
data daily to another volume)
2. performance (sustained tfr and seek)

Get 80GB SATA WDC Raptors.