HighPoint RocketRaid 6GB/s eSATA not launching my RAID 0 drive

Hi there,

I have a Mac Pro 3,1 (2008) with 8 cores, 10GB RAM. In 2011, I bought the HighPoint RocketRaid 6GB/s eSATA for Mac RAID card (model number 644MLF I believe). It has 4 eSATA ports. The RAID 0 was initialized with four 1TB external hard drives (WD Caviar Black in Startech eSATA / USB enclosures). I'm running Lion operating system (whatever the latest 10.7.x).

Unfortunately the RAID management is software based and I was alwasy suspecious about that because Disk Utility doesn't do much with setting things up or manipulating, restoring, etc.

Anyway, I was running smoothly. One time I had a fail to launch after the computer accidentally went to sleep mode. I restarted it and after a few attempts it worked.

I wasn't happy with this kind of odd behaviour but I thought I would never let it sleep again. But about a month ago it happened again and whatever I did, I couldn't make it to launch my RAID drive. It makes that sharp continuous beep sound and the system becomes very unstable unless I turn off the drives or even take the RocketRAID card out of the system.

The problem is I had it for RAID 0 since I was working on whole bunch of uncompressed full HD footage and I needed to maximize the smooth image. I thought eventually I buy a 4 TB drive as a backup connect it to my Time Machine and it backs up the RAID 0 that way but 4TB drives are (were) not out when I did the setup and I was too optimistic running my assets without backup in this time period.

Anyway, long story short, I'm now stuck in a situation that I don't want to completely re-initialize my drives because most probably I will loose my content (anyone that knows this please comment). I went to Apple store, they tested the drives and said they are fine, and they can't do anything with the RocketRaid card since it is a third party hardware!!! So someone tells them why do you sell it then!!??

I tried to get a hold of HighPoint tech support but they don't answer any tech calls. I filled out a web based support form. I doubt they can give me direction by emails back and forth.

Anyone had that experience before? Did you manage solving the launch problem? How?

Thanks for your help.