TMan, you might be right. The cables I am using are 24". The reason for this is that they are dual drive type and the slave connector is 16" from the system connector. Anything shorter won't reach. I have purchased a new raid card. When it arrives I will use six seperate cables and they will all be 18" or less.

Attack, Thanks for the links, that is pretty interesting. I don't think it is my problem however as I didn't have this problem, even writing to drives on this controller card until after I built the raid 5 array. I am convinced that this is due to the way the controller functions in a raid 5 configuration. The XOR computations that are done are handled by the main CPU and not a processor on the controller. The new card I'm getting does these computations through a 100mhz processor onboard, I think it should do the trick. Now if I can only figure out how to get a 13.5" card in a 10.5" space. Yep, the card is longer than the space I have to fit it. A slight oversight I made whilst in the heat of the battle on E-bay. It's nothing a high speed abrasive wheel some aluminum and a few rivets won't fix. I'm going to have to do a little surgery on the internal drive cage and lose one drive bay but that won't be too bad.