Dont skimp on cheap cards matey, I joined a company just over a year ago that were using these (1220sa variety) in customers machines as they thought having a controller with a pair of mirrored drives would be better and more reliable than a single drive, since just over a year ago we have had quite a lot of cards drop the array only to corrupt databases etc then take a drive back online and mirror over the corruptions.
Onboard raid 0,1 and 10 will be every bit as useable as that is what we have reverted to only I have specced using two single discs, one with the OS,programs and database log file and pagefile while the other contains the program database mdb file which has made a noticeable speed improvement.
