Well, to be perfectly blunt; On-board RAID controllers are crap (as it sounds like you found out)....also, most add-in cards are no better then on-board.
IMO, you really need to spend a MINIMUM of around £150 to get a decent RAID controller. You also want RAID5 for simplicity (requires 3 or more drives and you lose the capacity of 1 drive). Some RAID controllers will let you add more disks and extended arrays but you are then getting into big money.
For me, RAID5 is a godsend. The chances of 2 disks dying at the same time in my system are pretty slim (probably just cursed myself there
) so as long as I dont go deleting important data I should never lose the information I have and in the 1.5 years I have been running RAID5, I haven't lost any data but I did have a disk die only a few weeks ago - RAID saved me a LOT of time then
