Sorry to have upset any of you....I have had to troubleshoot this in my freetime and I've been EXTREMELY busy lately so my freetime has been sporadic at best. I've been working a lot and I just moved into a new apartment with my girlfriend so it has been tough. I will be doing a SMART test on it here shortly today and post here the results.
I have narrowed the problem down to the 200 GB hard drive. It was actually it that was causing the issue and not the 160 GB one. The problem got so bad after me trying to troubleshoot that the hard drive wouldn't even show up in windows. After uninstalling/reinstalling RAID drivers and setting the bios to IDE over and over, etc. I began experiencing a weird issue where when I was in IDE mode when I'd boot the computer, right after the windows xp flash screen and progress bar, the computer would just sit on a blank black screen. If the computer was in RAID mode it would boot up into windows just fine but the hard drive in question would not show up.
I finally removed the 200 GB hard drive from my machine and installed it as a second drive (slave) into my girlfriend's machine. The machine booted (slower than usual) and it even showed up with a drive icon in "my computer" on her system. However, the drive made her computer intermittently freeze up the way it had done to mine in the past and I could not get it to open so I could browse its contents. Through this hair pulling and trial/error I have narrowed it down to the hard drive having some kind of defect/failure. I might try the low level format you all mentioned previously and see how that goes. If that doesn't help I will probably RMA it with Maxtor.