I bought a Asus A8V deluxe a couple of year agoo and have big problems with SATA interface.It started when a Hitachi deskstar SATAI HD failed and needed to be replaced. They offered me a Maxtor SATAII 160 Gb and I then bought another one and connected them to the builtin promise raid controller in a raid 0 setup. Everything worked fine for some weeks. Then the problems started. During boot the system had problems detecting the array and I got a lot of event id 9 and 51 in my logbook. Maxtors own HD testprogram first reported both drives as without error but eventually started to indicate one of the drives as faulty. I got it replaced by a new identical drive. Again everything worked fine for some weeks then the first drive failed in the same way with the same symptoms.This time they agreed to replace both my drives with new WESTERN DIGITAL RE 160GB SATA/300 16MB drives designed to be used in raid setup. And again everything works perfect for some weeks but then again problems to detect the array during boot. But this time it seems to only occur shortly after the computer has been switched on but after a while it seems to be stable. So I run it for another month until now. The problems get more frequent. Computer hangs reboot can't find array. Some times one of the drive completely falls out of the array and needs to be rebuilt. And now WD testprogram has occasionally reported the drive as faulty. Also this testprogram has showed that when the controller isn't detecting the array one of the drives are not detected by the HD testprogram.Today I moved the drives to the other VIA controller. Result at one time the WD test program hanged up when executing a quicktest and once it failed to detect one of the drives but at that time both drives were detected by BIOS during boot. Could also point out that I have a much older IDE 60 Gb Maxtor that always has worked without problems. I have AMD 64 3200+ NVIDIA 6600GT 256M DDR3 Win XP Home 1 Gb 400 MHz RAM one CD and one DVD CD r/w combo drive.I have the latest BIOS and have updated the firmware in the HDs.I'm in the first hand looking to find someone who has experience with the same motherboard I use. Do you use SATA? Do you recognise any of these problems?

I have the Asus A8V board running with a Maxtor SATA I HDD without any problems. However I advised my brother-in-law to get the same board last year with a Hitachi Deskstar SATA II HDD which was supposedly backward compatible with SATA I. We managed to get it to work once. No matter what we did with the settings, auto or manual, so he then managed to get a Maxtor SATA I drive and it's been fine ever since. I know this is not much help to you other than saying the board doesn't like SATA II drives and just confirms your problem.SorryPhil

>I have the Asus A8V board running with a Maxtor SATA I HDD>without any problems. However I advised my brother-in-law to>get the same board last year with a Hitachi Deskstar SATA II>HDD which was supposedly backward compatible with SATA I. We>managed to get it to work once. No matter what we did with the>settings, auto or manual, so he then managed to get a Maxtor>SATA I drive and it's been fine ever since. I know this is not>much help to you other than saying the board doesn't like SATA>II drives and just confirms your problem.>The problem you describe is very different from mine. My SATAII drives works most of the time. I found out one thing that if you use the VIA interface you must set jumpers on the drive to force it into SATAI mode.