Hardware specs are at the end of the post.

I have a new motherboard, and I've been testing out the RAID-5 capabilities of it. After properly building aligning array, I've gotten some pretty good performance out of it. However, there's been a problem that crops up periodically with the board. When rebooting or starting-up the computer, the array fails at the bios level, but a quick second reboot fixes the problem and there is no loss of data.

It appears that the Hard Drives don't initialize fast enough for the RAID controller, and it mistakenly sees an error with the array. I've done a little surfing on the net, and it seems this is a common problem regardless of the MoBo manufacturer. However, I also see reports of these RAID arrays failing after hard usage, or failing within Windows itself. I've seen no mention of my specific chipset (it's in NForce 7 series, but possibly the newest version).

What I want to know is some people's input and experience with similar setups using the on-board RAID controller.

This computer is primarily an in-home file server, and some of the data it stores would be difficult or impossible to replace, and thus reliability is paramount. However the improved speed this hardware solution provides is better than the XP/2003 Software solution I previously used (before the previous MoBo failed). Another thought - if this motherboard or RAID controller were to fail, what would happen if I were to migrate to another NVidia-based RAID controller? Would the array be able to be imported, or would the data on the drive be lost forever?


System Specs:
Operating System used: Windows XP Pro (Vista x64 Tested briefly). OS is not installed on the array.
Motherboard being used: MSI K9N2G Neo (GeForce 8200 Chipset) Link(http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php [...] od_no=1493)
Processor: AMD 5000+
Memory: 2GB Kingston DDR800
Hard Drives being used: Three SATA 500 GB by Hitatchi (older, ~18 months old). One older IDE 120GB Western Digital for OS Install.