Thank you for your speedy reply!
1. No I am not using any RAID configuration. All of my drives show up individually in windows. The reason for this is I use the 250 GB as an OS drive with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 installed. This drive is in SATA slot 0. Then I use one of the 500 GB in SATA 1 for a media drive. I store all my important data on it. Then the last 500 GB installed in SATA 2 is a backup of drive in SATA 1. I have lost too much data before due to hard disk crashes. So I keep the OS separate, then a backup of everything. This configuration should not be an issue for this motherboard.
2. Yes, I have. In fact, when I build this, I started out with two 250 GB SATA 7200 RPM Western Digital 3.5" hard drives. There is no difference, and it was still slow. They both died though, wound up with sector errors. I figure, a hard drive is a hard drive. They have the same specs and transfer rates as what I took out. ALL of the drives are at 7200 RPM. I cannot tell you the specific /MB per second on them, but they are well fast enough for the SATA controller.
3. Unfortunately, I do not have other drives that I can load up and test to see if any of the drives are going out. I have no data loss, and Windows Disk Check finds no errors. So I figure they are okay. Since this issue happens regardless of what hard drive is installed, just happens when I have more than one, I think the drives themselves are okay. For now. All hard drives will fail eventually.
I forgot to mention a few things. This is also sort of odd. ALL of the drives are S.M.A.R.T. capable. But if I have the option in the BIOS for S.M.A.R.T. enabled, the computer won't POST. So it must be disabled for the computer to POST. Also, if I have the SATA mode set for Native instead of Legacy, it takes 10 minutes for the computer to POST, and the activity light stays steady until it begins to boot.