Ok, so for the past week I have been running with a new primary hard drive (hda), and the same secondary drive(hdb).

With this config I would occasionally see a stat_timo error on hdb. (I did see this with my original config on both hda and hdb)

So last night I blew away hdb with DBAN, then ran SpinRite to check for disk errors. I built the old hdb as hda (single drive conf), then loaded the player software. I synced a bunch of music overnight for my drive in to work today.

With the single drive (again originally hdb when everything first failed) I started getting the same stat_timo messages. Now at work I'm getting "No hard disk found..."

So I guess it comes down to this, is there anything that could have caused both hard drives to fail simultaneously like that while I was driving (not at startup or shutdown)? Would the same thing happen again to new hard drives?