Onboard Raid vs Dedicated Raid Controller

Onboard will be faster in IOps; many hardware RAID actually slow down SSDs due to their insane high IOps rate.

I recommend you use Intel onboard RAID if possible, and enable write caching. Do keep a backup elsewhere though of stuff you don't want to miss.

Since you don't have TRIM, i also highly recommend you do not use all space on the SSD. So if you get 2x 80GB = 160GB then you can create a C: drive on that volume of 120-140GB and leave the other space UNUSED and unpartitioned.

That would cope with having no TRIM support, and is necessary to keep SSDs from degrading rapidly in RAIDs without TRIM.

Thanks!