About a year ago I was using the native Intel ICH9R Raid 5 an Intel P35 based motherboard. The system was running Vista x64 and when one of the drives failed Vista blue screened on boot until I had figured out which drive had failed and removed it (a rather nerve racking hit and miss affair). The same thing happened some months later on another similar system so it wasn't a once off. This wasn't the robust raid 5 drive failure behavior that I would have hoped for and expected.

I moved to Highpoint Rocketraid 2300 and haven't had any problems although I have yet to have a drive fail with this set up.

But I am now looking to build a new system based on an i7 and Windows 7. At the moment Highpoint doesn't have drivers for Windows 7 so I am considering moving back to the on board Intel Raid. Yes I know I that I might get away with using the Vista drivers but I don't really want to take that chance with critical data.

The question then is has anyone else experienced a drive failure with Intel raid and how did the OS and drivers handle it? Is it safe to go back?