Georg,

What finally seemed to do the trick was moving the Kona card into slot 3 instead of slot 4. There was also a software upgrade/update with the Kona, but I *think* moving it to the other slot was the main factor... I know on my previous systems, on PCs, slot/card order could be a massive big deal.

Again, none of this ever happened/happens on 2 mac book pros. Only on the mac pro with the Kona card.

It took me six months of complaining to the systems integrator before they would really check out the hardware. They kept saying it was a software issue. I come from editing with Liquid (at the high end of that spectrum) on PCs, and 75% of the problems I had were hardware issues.

Hope this helps in some way ....

Just to wrap this up - it turned out there was apparently a bad drive in my RAID set. I thought my vendor had checked it, and being new to mac I didn't even know how to check it. I did ask that all the hardware be checked out, but evidently that never fully happened.

The first full replacement RAID worked for a week and then became intermittent - I was shipped a new RAID enclosure, put in the drives, and that one has been working ever since.

At this point I don't know if the Kona 3 card really had anything to do with this at all, as everything seems to be humming along nicely now that the RAID is functional.

I do wish the vendor had been a bit more diligent about checking out the hardware, instead of assuming operator error or software issues. It would have saved me months of problems. But I hope someone else benefits from this experience.

Best,
John