I am having the same issue here and coincidentally am using the same gigabyte i5 board with a lsi 9650SE-16ML card. I have been using the card for about a year and the driver installed works great, but recently I had my first drive failure and now I am concerned because we have no ability to see the drives' status without rebooting the machine which is a main SAN that runs numerous VMs and painful to reboot.
Any progress here or creative ideas?