Whoever decided that “FakeRAID”, which is a highly technical term used to describe the types of Serial ATA RAID apearing on some cheaper motherboards, was a good idea needs a severe beating. It appears that FakeRAID is just basically a BIOS hint, requiring the CPU on the machine to do the majority of the work with regards to creating and maintaining the array. I was trying to make Ubuntu do the FakeRAID thing on a server at work, but I think I’m just going to use the Linux software RAID, which seems to be the conventional wisdom these days anyway.
Now back to your regularly scheduled gun blogging.
software RAID is what you want, yes, because it tends to be more flexible (less requiring that the disks be absolutely identical) and more robust (motherboard fried? any other mobo capable of reading the disks can run the OS that created the array for you). hardware RAID may offload the CPU more, but really, CPU cycles are seldom in short supply any longer.