Intel Storage Matrix FTL

Intel Storage Matrix For The Lose....
I have had limited experience with Intel Storage Matrix... I started off thinking I was impressed but now not so much.

The setup was 2 x 1Tb Samsung's in RAID 1 using the ISM RAID on a Gigabyte X48T-DQ8 motherboard. The tools that built the computer had installed Vista already even though I asked them not to... boo. But I got into the ISM setup at boot and had it create me a RAID 1 across the drive. This was cool...

Vista recognised it without the need for adding disks, drivers etc (as I expected to be honest). OS installed and all was well until we ran Ubuntu 8.04 from another drive. It came up as two drives...

"WHAT?", I asked. I quickly learnt there was such thing as "Fake RAID". Windows looked after fixing up the accidental change I had made to the drive in Ubuntu, but I really hated this idea.

Anyhoo... since then we have taken Vista off the "RAID" drives and instead used them for Media storage only. What annoys me the most now is every second or third boot for no apparent reason the ISM boot screen shows both drives as "Offline members".

"WTF?", I proclaimed. Nothing in the ISM menus really helped (options are Create or Delete RAID, wow!). This gets SILLY annoying because when the drives come back the Motherboard BIOS decides to set it as the main boot drive which of course fails.

So to you Intel Storage Matrix I say "GO AWAY". Going to see if the Gigabyte is more reliable. But I am disappointed first of all with the existence of this "fake RAID" business, my lack of prior research, but the fact that even then it seems so flakey.

Any one who ever reads this and has any ideas drop me a comment... but I have a feeling a firmware update or a drive format will help me. I shouldn't need that help though.