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Thanks for the response. The documentation for the 8RDA6 Pro (and the box, etc.) actually specified RAID5. That is actually one of the reasons I chose that particular board. Few (if any) boards were advertising RAID 5 at the time. It appears to have always been "supported" for that board. I am not sure I want to use the Merlin mod. I had been tracking that for quite some time, and the last ones I saw had some real annoying things in them that I decided I did not want to put up with. The revision dates from SI are much newer than the last time Merlin posted a BIOS. I still don't think I want to risk that.

I looked into the files I downloaded from SI. There is a section that lists "problem drives" and disables command queuing if it finds one. There are two items in the instruction line, and I don't know how to create that data.

This is, I believe the firmware for the SI chip and may not ever have been fooled with by Epox. That is one of the things I would like to find out.

I will try asking SI. I thought I would start from the motherboard side. I really would like to run RAID 5 without buying a new system. If I built a new one I would have to replace just about everything to go to current standards (RAM, graphics [I have AGP], maybe drives (I still have two PATA), I need two parallel ports and the card I have is PCI, etc.)

As I mentioned, I had BSD after installing the Samsung drives. I have had this thing running for quite a while without that happening. I took them out and have had no recurrence. I really hate coincidence. Particularly as there are well known problems with Samsung F series drives, command queuing, and Nvidia chip sets.