So, my home PC had a 300GB hard disk that I've been running on for awhile. There seems to have been a rash of failed disks around me (friends and family) and its gotten me a little more paranoid than ...

It's not hardware RAID. The RAID is handled by the BIOS (firmware, still running on your CPU) until Windows starts to boot, at which point Intel's driver (Matrix Storage Manager, i.e. software) takes ...