Chipset support/RAID recommendations?

[Mark Stodola]

I'm in the process of spec'ing some new hardware and am looking at a 
Supermicro X11SAE 
(https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SAE.cfm) 
motherboard.  Does anyone have any experience with this board, or at 
least the C236 chipset with SL7x?

Also, can anyone recommend a supported RAID card.  Only looking for a 2 
drive, RAID 1 setup.  I'm presently using an Areca ARC-1200, but think 
it is a performance bottleneck, as it is only SATAII.  They offer a 
SATAIII, but looks like it might be a bit on the new side and turn into 
a fight with drivers.

I have poked at using software RAID or the onboard Intel 
implementations, but am not sure how much integrity I can expect, 
especially when suffering a sudden power loss.  I have had good luck 
with "real" hardware cards and so have a bias toward them.

With software RAID, I understand that a separate boot partition must 
live on 1 of the drives.  What happens if the drive with the boot 
partition fails?  Maybe this has already been addressed and I'm just way 
behind the curve here...

-Mark