ATA RAID. Promise FastTrack TX2000 monitoring utility

Anyone out there have any experience with a Promise FastTRAK 2000 controller
in RAID 1 service?

1) It would seem that Promise's array monitoring utility, PAM, needs to be
running for it to provide detection of a hard drive failure, or imminent
failure. Yet Promise doesn't provide for running PAM as a service so you
see it in the system tray but not on the task bar.

Can PAM be run as a service, or am I missing something and it doesn't have
to be run full time at all?

2) The PAM utility gives the option of synchronizing the array's drives on
a schedule....hourly, daily, etc. etc. The manual says this is a
maintenance function, but is it really necessary? I thought the whole idea
of RAID 1 is the drives are ALWAYS synchronized.