I've had a chance now to check out the latest FJ BIOS, they rock!!!!

No SATA boot delay issue...everything is working perfect, it's just like FH,
but more recent. The date displayed during bootup is September 10th 2004.

In fact, and it might be my imagination, i think the boot time is a little
quicker using FJ. Overall i am most pleased and Gigabyte have resolved the
bug i reported.