Shades: raid
mirror is just fine for the system disk, since if one drive fails, you'll just be running with a degraded array (but it still
runs). Striping, on the other hand, is dangerous

Snobbery about hardware vs. software raid is plain silly - you need expensive controller cards with battery-backed buffer memory for hardware raid stuff. And you only need that if you do some pretty high-end stuff. The cheaper "hardware" controllers still do pretty much everything via OS drivers.
That said, I'd much rather go for one of the el-cheapo "hardware" controllers than hacking XP system files into enabling raid mirror mode.