Super slow ST3320613AS drives

I am on my second day of struggling with 2 Seagate ST3320613AS 7200.11 drives that in a Raid-0 array on the Asus P5E3 Deluxe system boards ACH9R Sata are running incredibally slow. It took hours to format. The drives have a fast initial burst of speed then rapidly slow down to less than floppy drive speed. For example,
when I tried to copy 2,861 items = 2.58 GB from a Raid-0 150GB Raptors I saw a brief burst of write speed of about 110 MB/s and it quickly slowed down from there. After 20 minutes, Vista Home Premium 32 reported a transfer rate of 62 KB/s with 1,975 items = 1,35 GB left and an estimate of 1 hour 55 minutes to completion. When I cancel the job it takes about 20 minutes before the drive stops holding the system hostage as it prevents a restart of the system.

In an earlier case, I tried to copy 295,230 item = 39.4 GB and after an hour Vista reported there were still 209,604 items = 32.9 GB remaining and an estimate of 18 hours and 3 minutes left at its current transfer rate of 106 KB/s.

I used Seagate's Tools to test the drive and it reported that the drives were "Security Freeze Locked". I tried to clear track 0 and write zeros across the drives and they reported passing the Tools (DOS ver 1.10) tests. I then tried formating them as single drives and the system stalled at 29% on one drive and 2% on the other. I did a shut down and cold restart and reran Tools and got passes on the drives. I updated the Intel's INF files and Matrix files with the latest version from Intel's site, restarted and tried setting up a Raid-0 array from the Matrix software instead of using the BIOS. An array was created but got the same poor result when I attempted to copy files to it and the system began to act erraticly, mouse uncontrollable, no response to key presses, and I had to shut down by pressing the reset switch.

Am I just a victim of crappy Seagate 7200.11 drives, or will the ICH9R chip on an x38 Express system board not support 3 Raid-0 arrarys from 6 SATA drives? Seagate should be embarrased to sell hard drives that are supposed to be the latest and greatest and cannot keep up with a flopy drive in write performance.

I bought these drives from Newegg on June 8th, 2008.