I am fully in agreement that hardware could possibly be the cause.  Perhaps what I'm really trying to say could be summarized like this.

• Because this software is in beta, it too could be the cause, in fact this is very likely for that reason alone.  I have had it crash for no reason at all (usually it complaining about its own database files after an improper shutdown).  This could be happening to everybody and we may just not know it.
• RAID is not a solution to the specific conjecture offered.  If this were a hardware error under identical circumstances, RAID would have given no benefit, just because of what RAID is and isn't.
• Software issues that could contribute to this include the following: misuse of stray pointers, accessing freed memory, threading-related issues, buffer overruns.  Or, it could be hardware.
• A potential tool to help rule out software issues might be to distribute this blockchain verification code and have others run it.  I'd run it.  Who knows.  Maybe my copy of the block chain will have a similar kind of corruption in a different block.  If it did, then there's likely a software gremlin lurking.

EDIT: Here might be a good way for any volunteers to quickly rule out this same thing.

If I do:

Then we should all get the same results, right?  (my blk0001.dat is currently 617037299 bytes long)
Mine is 808717dfd1a8af65b60243c4278aff43454fb8df3b3dc597df67265acf851642.