HDD issues, $MFT and SATA controller

Hi,

I have 2 Maxtor 300gb SATA drives  (6v300fo) connected to my HP XW6000 via an adaptec 1210sa serial ATA controller (http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/raid_tech/sata_drives/AAR-1210SA/). I'm running XP pro SP2, 2 x 2.8 Xeon, 2gb memory.

Since I first started using the SATA drives (they are both extra drives, not my OS drive) I keep getting the following errors:

Event ID 15:
Source: Disk

The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, is not ready for access yet.

And....

Event ID 50
Source: NTFS

{Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file . The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.


Basically, I lose access to the drives (sometimes just to 1 of them, usually to both of them) and this is usually accompanied by a pop up system tray balloon that tells me that my MFT is inaccessible. I've ran a chkdsk on the drives, no bad sectors.

Any thoughts? I'm thinking that maybe there's a conflict with the raid card having the 2 drives plugged in? Anything I can do to the bios - anything to do with IRQs?

Thanks!