Experiencing corruption! What's a good reliability test for a Windows file system, RAID or otherwise?

It should be easy to setup a shell script that repeats copying a file on the server and recalculates the checksum of each copy. After it fills your sever, you check all the checksums by hand.

My experience is that raid controllers that have Promise written on the outside are broken on the inside. Get rid of it. Sometimes even the Promise controllers only make a driver driven software raid. Try Areca or so.

If you plan for raid, put a pricetag on your data. Then put a pricetag on not being able to work a few days. Then check for prices of good raid controllers.

You don't need to cough money for ram testing tools, because memtest86+ rules and is free. To test the filesystem integrity you could use afick, it works fine for me (but I didn't used it much on windows, though).

What is the make of your drives? a priori, I'd suspect the Promise card. They have a very long and painful history of absolutely shitty products, with abysmal performance, data corruption, buggy drivers, and various combinations of all of these.

Are you sure it's the RAID controller? I've experienced similar problems that had to do with the network drivers / card failing.

You say that other PCs can copy files to each other, but that doesn't mean the server network card (or driver) isn't fritzy.