Just picked up one of these 2.0TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 4 Bay eS... (MEQX2T2.0S) at OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEQX2T2.0S/) Witha Rosewill RC216 eSATA card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132014

Using the eSata interface of the RAID tower, I did some DV capture today... in 1 hr of footage, Vegas reported 10 dropped frames.. what the heck!? I haven't had dropped frames in years.. and that was with my internal 7200RPM non-RAID drives..

What could be causing the dropped frames? bad RAID tower? or bad eSATA interface card? Thanks.

It seems that your eSATA card is not on the list of supported eSATA cards.

Yeah I know, could be a poor quality eSATA card.. but eSATA is not exotic technology and there is no reason why any other eSATA won't work with the tower...

I captured the same tape again, this time into my internal drive. I stacked the two clips and compared the waveform.. there was no lose of sync anywhere! Perhaps Vegas was mistakenly reporting dropped frames? I find Vegas' capture dialog box to be extremely strange. You know the area of the window where it shows dropped frames & timecode - well if I drag the video capture application window from my primary monitor to my secondary monitor, the dropped frames counter resets to zero! I was able to reproduce this consistently everytime. Why does it do this?

...if I drag the video capture application window from my primary monitor to my secondary monitor, the dropped frames counter resets to zero!

That's one way to solve an issue with dropped frames.