Ok so here is what I have, 3 broken machines, all with bad hard drives. I am not talking about a little logical damage to the drive where recovery is a possibility with software. Oh no these are full blow physical recoveries. In machine one I have a RAID 0, running 2 Seagate 80gb SATA drives. This machine is the one that continued to fail over and over. What I did to eventually to stop the madness was to NOT set it up as an array. What is strange to me is that one of the drives in the array (all three times) were physically gone, and when I say gone I mean gone, clicking, screeching, and knocking; really the whole enchilada. I am not sure if it is the MSI on-board Intel controller that was causing the problem or if it is really poorly made hard drives.
Every time I got the same hard drives, although with the 4th batch of drives I did notice that the revision number was different. Maybe the drive manufacturer finally found whatever was causing the drives o fail like that and fixed it? Either way I am sitting on 3 months of running solid with these drives. The problem I have now is that 80 gigs just aren’t big enough for everything I have installed on the machine. A lot of programs out there do not like to be installed on anything but the “c” partition. I can see having to upgrade the drive very soon, which with all the OS reloading I have had to do lately doesn’t appeal to me at all. If this sounds familair to you find out more about hard drive recovery.