RAID with Intel ICH8R Chipset

So after having 3 hard disks fail on me in the past year, I've decided to get a few more hdd's and raid my exsisting data. (BTW, i'm running a ga-965p-dq6 w/ ICH8R, 2GB ddr2 ram, oc'd e6600 @ 2.9ghz, with 3x 250GB sata2 disks)

I was thinking of using the RAID capapabilities built into my motherboards intel chipset. my main question is, is intel implementation of raid in their ich8r/965 chipset software, hardware, or hybrid?

e.g.
hardware - controller does all the work, calculates parity, does not offload onto cpu
software - all implemented through low level drivers, all processing done with cpu which lags the pc, and affects overall write performance
hybrid - the chipset handles the read/writes for mirroring and striping, but parity and the rest are done by cpu

i'm looking to implement either RAID 1, 5 or 10, but if it will tie up my computer, i'll have to fork out for a pci-e controller or something...

If anyone can clear this up, it would be appreciated!

... intels website has so much waffled and fancy flash demos, it makes me puke...