Stranger than we dreamt it... I got a new, identical card, the Syba 4-port PCI card and had EXACTLY the same problems. Tried with all new cables, exact same problems. Moved the card into each PCI slot in the system. Same problems. I put the drives and cables into a different system onto an onboard SATA controller, and they work fine, so drives and cables are "known good". It seems unlikely that two identical cards would be broken in exactly the same way, so I have to revert back to my previous suspicion: bad interaction between the card's firmware and the driver. This evening, I will try out the weird card in the new system's motherboard, to see if it's something in the old mobo that doesn't like this card. I will hold on to this card at least until weekend for testing, and longer if anyone thinks they might have a patch for me to test. My thanks to everyone who's still paying attention to this thread. =) -- Josh Litherland (josh@xxxxxxxxxxx) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html