I can't speak for this mobo, but Vista Ult x64 had the required drivers alread for ICH7R> So I should think since ICH8R was our already by Jan this year, they should be there as well. If making the floppy from ASUS, make sure it's the x64 version.

Do a test, with just 1 or 2 of the Raptors on SATA 1 & 2, boot to Vista x64 DVD (or CD) w/o hiting f6 to see if it sees the drives and loads Vista set up, in AHCI/RAID ready mode, no array yet.

Remember, if it is allready loaded on one HDD in RAID/AHCI mode, you should be able to easily migrate to RAID "0" via the Matrix Mannager in Vista. It works this way for XP x64