8KNXP, SATA Intel ICH5R and SMART

After having a drive of a RAID 0 go bad on me and giving SMART errors
(as seen during boot with the intel RAID), and after rebuilding the
system several times over a few months (yes, I had backups :-)), I
received a replacement drive. I then decided to install the two SATA
drives without a RAID and got another IDE drive just for some data
backup. All 3 drives are 200Gig each.

I realize many out there disable SMART, but I just wanted to check it
once in a while to see if things are fine. I got a couple of SMART
capable utilities and ran them. I can only see the primary SATA drive
and my IDE SMART status. Second SATA drive does not show up as SMART
capable. I switched the drives and also cables, same result. 2nd
drive does show SMART when connected to primary location so it is
fine. I believe the issue is with the second channel.

I contacted giga-byte and thought that maybe upgrading from F6k to F9
might help. I upgraded the bios (after some hickups and hangs of the
intel RAID controller on boot) and I also upgraded the intel WinxP
drivers and I still get the same result. In addition, the "SCSI"
option does not show up in BIOS for a boot device, although windows
does boot from the SATA drive. BIOS SMART option enable/disable does
not seem to have any effect one way or the other.

Giga-byte, after many exchanges, tells me that a) not having the SCSI
option show up is just fine, and b) non OS drive will not display
SMART.

Neither of these makes sense to me since the IDE drive isn't an OS
drive either but does show SMART.

My questions:

1) have others experienced the SCSI option issue and is there a way to
bring it back? With the option gone, is the drive being mapped to IDE
and am I losing some SATA performance?

2) is this true regarding the secondary SATA channel not showing
SMART, or is this an issue with the ICH5R chip? Since on boot both
show "normal", I wonder if it is still some WinXP driver issue that
causes all the utilities to not see the status of the 2nd drive.

Thanks!