Well guys after a year or two of using this board and also considering the ICH7 is not new anymore I am very dissapointed with how buggy the matrix storage drivers are. Over the course of time me using the board the ICH7 ACHI/RAID drivers have caused me some problems.

It seems I either have to have slow drive performance on the ICH7 or instability if I want full sata features.

I have now decided to move my OS drive to the jmicron sata port and will run that in ACHI mode. So the raptor has command queueing.

All other drives on the intel controller in ide mode, which is at least stable with full write caching features.

I have concluded the intel controller is ok for raid (on xp, vista has a lot of problems according to google) but for non raid the driver development has failed and the hardware review sites made the mistake of only testing raid configuration on the controller.

Summary of problems I have had.

Initial driver version in AHCI mode I think 6.x version, very slow drive performance, write caching completly disabled on both intel and jmicron controllers, the intel driver overules the jmicron driver.
7.8 version RAID driver, the driver stopped overuling jmicron and now the jmicron drives have write caching and perform excellent, the intel drives appear to have limited write caching or at least write faster than the older driver version however can still not toggle write cache in device manager.
8.0 version, I think these are beta drivers as not available on intels website, these drivers at first seemed to be great they allow full write caching and can toggle in device manager, but I keep getting weird issues like pauses and iastor timeouts. The same iastor timeouts vista users get but I run XP. This is the only version of intel matrix drivers that actually run my drives at full speed, no stuttering in video clips etc. and fast writing due to cache. These drivers are beta to be fair tho so hopefully the release versions will keep the write caching and be stable, but until then I be changing my drive configuration.

Some of you if you say well you should be using ide for single drives please bear in mind I want command queueing for my OS drive and that sata supposedbly utilises better power saving.