New build need suggestions and I have some questions...

[FingerDemon]

Okay, first of all I am trying build a rock solid stable system. At least as much as is possible. I have next to no free time anymore to mess around with my system and my last build has had a fair number of problems. (That's the problem with me building my own machine... the tech support sucks!

The new build will be replacing almost everything but the Antec Sonata case(original not a newer version) and I'm iffy on replacing the Earthwatts 430 (its pretty new). I don't know of a reason that case won't work, but please enlighten me if you do know.

I am looking at getting:
ABIT IP35 Pro LGA 775
Intel Core 2 Q6600
MSI NX8800GT 512M OC GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express
CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb

I haven't built a machine since I did my Asus A7N8X 2.0 a few years back. That one seemed to have intermittent trouble with USB and I have had a lot of bad luck with hard drives dying.

I am thinking of getting two smallish drives and setting up a RAID mirror array, just so I don't have to rebuild due to another crash. How hard is that anyway?

It might be really stupid but I am avoiding Gigabyte due to the latency problems and I am avoiding ASUS because when I last researched USB problems Microsoft said they had a problem with the way ASUS boards powered USB and there was no fix available. Probably a bunch of hooey, and/or it has been fixed by now, but I just want something really stable and reliable. I won't be overclocking or putting in two video cards. I like gaming, but don't play the latest ones anyway.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[VulcanX]

Ok well let me try answer them one by one
First off, which USB doesnt want to work? the mobo USB or the USB on your case?
Secondly setting up RAID wasnt difficult at all, well mine had built in utilities and all i had to do was literally enable RAID on the two drives and i had my choice of which RAID to run etc, but thats only if your mobo supports it, otherwise you will have to do it the manual way, which is converting your drives from basic to dynamic drives, that is from compmgmt.msc(run command), then go to disk management, then you right click the name of the drive, so for instance lets say it is:
_____
disk 0
basic
74.52 Gb
online
_____
thats what will display, you then right click that, and say convert to dynamic disk, dont worry bout it, its nothing intense, just follow the steps etc, and do it for both, but once converted you cant switch to basic, there isnt much difference anyway from what i know, then select the two and right click and select create partition and whatever follow the steps, i cant remember fully but those are the crucial steps
And regarding your mobo, i think you should seriously look at the LGA 775 Asus range, i bought the M2N Sli Dlx recently and havent had one single prob and it has dual Gbit lan and even built in RAID for 0,1,5,10 and JBOD, so its pretty cool man and i havent had one USB prob at all, that sounds like your USB wasnt getting sufficient power to be honest, have you tried another power supply, it is possible yours is faulty, but it is decent tho and you definitely have enough juice to your system
Hope this helps you out