You are talking about something called Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST). It is a relatively recent (late 2009 / early 2010) successor to the Intel Matrix Storage Manager (IMSM) technology. It was introduced in conjunction with the debut of Windows
7.
Both allow you to configure your computer to use hardware-based RAID (provided you have a supported Intel chipset). See these links on Wikipedia for an overview of RAID concepts and on the Intel website for an overview of Intel's implementation of RAID:
With Intel's implementation of RAID there is a device driver which gets loaded at system startup and then there is a management tool (with a graphical user interface) that you can bring up (once Windows is running) to view the status of your storage volumes,
change settings, and deal with problems). The icon you refer to is placed in the notification area by the management tool to indicate the health status of your storage volumes. Normally it would show a picture of a disk drive with a green checkmark ("Status
OK") but it will show other things to indicate if there's a problem or if it's doing something like rebuilding a volume.
Anyway, I have encountered the same icon/message on my system (Windows 7 x64 with Intel RST 9.6 installed). On my system it shows up for about 1-2 minutes immediately after Windows starts up and I log in. It eventually changes to the "OK" (green checkmark).
On my system I think it's just a timing problem with the multiplicity of services that startup when Windows itself starts up. I am satisfied that things are OK for me. My issue only began after I upgraded from Intel RST 9.5 to Intel RST 9.6.
I would recommend that you check whether it stays there indefinitely on your system or if it's just temporary (as I've described for my system).
Hope this helps...