Re:The boards look great, except... (Score 1)

Timeout errors with PATA/SATA drives in server and RAID configurations are covered in this Western Digital document.

http://westerndigital.com/en/library/sata/2579-001 098.pdf

Essentially, regular desktop drives will try for a very long time to correct read errors. RAID controllers will only wait about 8 seconds for a read. If the drive takes longer than that, the controller will treat it as failed and remove it from service. So WD offers a series of drives that will only try to correct errors for a short time and then return an error to the controller if they can't fix it in time.