RAID 0 problems

Hello,

I have a Gigabyte GA-7VT600 1394 motherboard + Athlon 2600 XP CPU. The hard
drives are one Seagate 160gig on the primary IDE channel and two 80gig
Seagate 7200.7 Sata drives configured as RAID 0 on the motherboards Sata
connectors. The motherboard's RAID function is controlled by the
Southbridge : VIA 8237 chipset.

I am not sure if one of the RAID drives is faulty or if the the problem is
with the controller(or software). I had recently ran a defrag program,
'PerfectDisk 6', and after doing so, found that I had problems with my
system freezing up for a time whilst it tried to read the data on the RAID
drives. Eventually, the RAID setup became in accessable. I deleted the
RAID drives using the VIA RAID configuration software and then using the
same software re-enabled the drives. The drives were also enabled as a
single partition in using WinXP's 'Performance and Maintenace' in 'Control
Panel'. There have been a couple of times over the past week where this
problem has occurred again after trying to access data.

It seems that since running the defrag program it has stuffed the drives to
work efficiently together. I have also run CHKDSK to see if there are
errors on either of the drives and all appears ok. Also, when I have
checked the VIA RAID Tool software it reports that both drives are working
harmoniously together. Although, I have backups etc (I want to use the
RAID for video editing, I am a little nervous that this setup is a bit
unreliable. I have uninstalled PerfectDisk and now have Diskeeper 8
running. After running this defrag program a couple of times there were
initial hicups with the RAID setup when data again became inaccessable.
After deleting and reinstalling the RAID configuration (via software) a
couple of times, the RAID setup now appears to be working ok (fingers
crossed).

I have aanother computer with a couple of 120gig drives configured as RAID
0. This setup is on an Asus P4C800E Deluxe board with a Promise RAID
controller. As yet I have not experienced any problems with that setup.

I am wondering if the VIA RAID controller on the Gigabyte board is a bit
flakey. Does anyone have any experience with this and/or some suggestions?

Thanks,
Shane