BigXor

I connected a separate 630 watt psu to the array and it still freezes until the array becomes available. I think I will take allen2 advice and just leave it on.

Interesting, I have a 750w single rail psu, but I also have an overclocked 4 core cpu, graphics card, sas expander, raid controller and five other drives. I will connect another psu to the 8 drives by themselves and the rest of the computer will be on the regular psu. This should help identify if I need a larger supply. I will be back with a reply later.

My drives do stagger up. My computer goes back to completely normal after it freezes.

I have an Adaptec 5445 + HP Expander v2.08 connected to a Raid 6 array of 8 Hitachi 5k3000 2TB drives and when the array powers up from sleep it freezes the graphics or the computer until the drives are fully spinning and the controller puts them online. It's not the expander as it also does it if the drives are connected to the controller directly. More than likely it could be the computer as the speakers buzz also, and they are not connected to the graphics card. The latest firmware and drivers for everything in the computer are current.

allen2 - You were correct, I forgot to to turn off file indexing for that array after adding it to windows disk manager. All is well. Powering down an eight drive backup array saves around 45 watts of power.

My raid arrays are set to power down after one hour of inactivity, but XP x64 is starting them up occasionally. I'm not sure but I believe it may have something to do with polling the drive or file checking or something. Anybody know what it is and how to disable it??

It winds up that I had to reinstall Windows XP x64 from scratch and all is well.

Before writing any data chkdsk and chkntfs are OK when I format using a different OS then start using XP x64 again. SP2 Raid 5 will not format either. I have taken the 4 drives and zeroed them, then put them back on the controller so I can do a fresh initialize. I was using these on a RocketRaid 2310 and don't know if that will help. I do have a Chenbro CK 23601 SAS Expander on order, but it has not left the factory in Taiwan yet. It may be a compatibility glitch with the drives. I have used WD drives in raid 5 before (had to jumper down to 1.5gbs) and Win XP x64 format and worked just fine.

I have an Adaptec 5445, 4 Hitachi 5k3000 2TB Drives and they are on the Adaptec compatibility list. Using Win XP x64 after a completed Build/Verify I get a formatting error after converting to a GPT disk. I have used Win 7 repair disk and formatted the drive, but when I get over 2 TB of movies transferred Windows starts corrupting previously copied directories. The more data over 2TB I transfer the more directories it corrupts. I have also used Parted Magic to format the array. So far this is happening with Raid 6 array, I am currently building a Raid 5 array but that should make absolutely no difference to the OS. (just checking anyway). Anybody run into this problem?