PE800 RAID-1 Rebuild Farkled

I have a PE800 (installed 8/2005) with 2 250gb drives as RAID-1.  Fine for 3 years, but not two months after the maintenance expired (they wanted as much to extend as a new box and wouldn't let us downgrade to NBD from 4-hour!  Different issue, though.), we start having trouble with the drives.

System completely died one day because drive0 failed.  I rebuilt it from drive1 and all seemed happy...no warnings, no errors.  A few days later, MS sends down one of their updates for SBS2003 that requires a restart.  Next morning, I get calls from the users that the server's down.

The box was sitting there with the warning about the array having failed.  Drive0 is again failed, Drive1 is healthy.  Have to hit enter to continue the boot.  Box runs, users are happy.  I'm not.

I rebuild again that night.  Same thing...system says it's happy, restarts fine a few times.

A few days later, we had to down because the building was cutting power over the weekend for some work on the feeders.  Come Monday morning, boot stops with that infernal "backup your data immediately and run for your lives" warning.

I ordered two 500gb Maxtors to replace the existing ones, but unless we have a total failure of the array before, it will be Christmas week before I can have the box down long enough to do a complete regen.

My question is: is there some way to get rebuild to be more aggressive in finding or reporting a problem with drive0?  Or, is there some way to just break the darn RAID without losing the good drive and running on it as a standalone drive?  If it weren't for the users making my life miserable if the server gets stuck during restart, I would just live with it until I can regen (I'm at a number of different companies, so I'm not always right there to keep the box happy.)