Hardware RAID and FreeBSD.

Hello, BSDians.

I am kind of a n00b to FreeBSD but have had great success and fun with
it so far.

I have two old Dell servers at home.  One has Ubuntu server and is my
web and mail server.  The other is FreeBSD, and I run servers for a
video game on it.  I really like the FreeBSD server, especially the
ports system, and how well it runs even though it is a 1GHz CPU.

Anyways, I bought a new lower-end computer that I was hoping to replace
both with.  It is a dirt-cheap dual-core AMD that I had built for
$175US.  It came with a 500GB HDD, and I would like to get another one
to put in it.  Now, I would like to set up as a mirrored RAID setup (I
think). I don't really know much about RAID, but I want to have the same
disk image on both hard drives (in case one fails), and possibly three
if I buy another HDD in the future.  Is RAID 1 what I want?  I also want
to do SVN on it for my PhD code, as well as back up my Wordpress,
Coppermine, etc...

Now, here is where the FreeBSD gurus can chime in.  I would like to get
a hardware RAID card to tie it all together.  I am also looking for a
cheap one, maybe $30-$60US, if this is even feasible.  Anyone have any
suggestions?  Any successes?  

Also, I see a lot of talk on here bout ZFS.  Is this something I should
try, instead of the standard UFS?

Thanks for any help and suggestions!

Colin.