Well according to Seagates tool, these drives are not affected with the firmware problem of the 7200.11 drives. I know it's not just a Vista problem, because I used to have XP on the 320GB, and they would drop. The 500GB used to be in an external Sans Digital enclosure RAID-1. But they would drop out periodically. There has never been any FW updates for these drives either and each pair have the same FW.
1. Tried different sata cables and a known-good power supply I had laying around.
2. Tried older Intel Matrix Manager and older drivers.
3. Took all PCI cards out except for PCI-e video.
4. Ran memory test last week, all memory good.
5. Ran Prime95 last week for 24 hours, CPU is stable.
6. Fresh install of Vista x64.
Only thing I haven't tried is setting the jumper on the drives to limit to 1.5gb transfer rate. But then again, why should I have to do that?
After fresh install of Vista, I start defrag with PerfectDisk 10, and one drive dropped. I rebuilt the array and is now up. But I can't waste any more time with these drives. I'm going to Fry's tomorrow to buy different drives. They have 30 day return policy, so if anything goes wrong I can take them back for full refund.
But I have to say, that I think Seagate needs to do tests on these Maxtor drives too. Their FW issue may affect a larger batch of drives than what they first realized. I'll let you know how it goes when I get the new drives up and running.
