It's complicated. For consumer level users I'd recommend software RAID because knowing what your getting with hardware RAID is tricky. If your motherboard offer

It's complicated. For consumer level users I'd recommend software RAID because knowing what your getting with hardware RAID is tricky. If your motherboard offers a built-in RAID it's almost certainly crap and your better off disabling it first thing. In general these aren't actually hardware RAIDs anyway, it's actually implemented in the drivers. Low end RAID cards are sometimes better, but mdraid or windows RAID will still probably be more reliable. It's really only expensive enterprise-grade RAID cards that meaningfully compete with software RAID and you'll want to look at the tradeoffs of each.