HELP! RAID 1 drive keeps going "missing" during rebuild???

[idata]

I have 2 Seagate Barracuda ST3750528AS 7200.12 SATA 3Gb/s 750GB Hard Drives with firmware CC45 configured in RAID 1 running under Windows 7 64 bit. A couple of days ago the Intel Rapid Storage application gave me an error message that the array was degraded due to a missing disk. There were never any error mesages prior to indicate that a disk was malfunctioning in any way.

I rebooted the machine and the Intel Rapid Storage application found the "missing" drive and began to rebuild the array. However suddenly at around 29% rebuild, the disk went missing again. Now, here's the really strange happening .... if I click the "refresh" button in the Intel Rapid Storage application (on the "Status" page, top right beside "Storage System View"), the "missing" disk is found again and the "rebuild" restarts. The next time it got to about 40% and the array again suddenly degraded when the drive went missing again.

I installed SeaTools for windows, but all that runs is the "generic" test which passes. HOWEVER, when the disk is in the "missing" state, starting SeaTools which scans for disks in the system, somehow again kickstarts the missing drive and the array starts to rebuild! But it never completes as the drive drops out again.

I have upgraded the Intel RAID driver to 10.6.0.1022 but that didn't help. I also see that there is a firmware upgrade for the Barracude driver to version CC49, but I apparently can't upgrade that unless the array is fully functional !!!!

One other hint, the last time the array degraded due to the disk going "missing", Norton flagged a "High System Usage" event with something about trying to write a 42 mb file. I may be grasping at straws here.

Anyone have any ideas and suggest some next steps!!!

[Daniel_O_Intel]

I would first recommend replacing the cable on the "missing" drive.