Raid setup issues

Help please..

I have ASUS X99-S Mobo, and have a SSD with wins 10 and a pair of empty 500GB drives.
the machine boots fine when in ACHI mode..
However, if I go into RAID mode.. set up the pair of 500GB drives in RAID0 and then restart - the machine will not boot.. saying inaccessible boot device, even though I am telling it to continue to boot from the SSD.

Interestingly.. once I have tried.. and it failed to boot.. I go back to bios.. set RAID off (back to ACHI), restart machine,
but when I get back into windows - disk management shows the 2 500gb drives as a 1tb...
But RAID is OFF!!!?? .. weird..

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance