I added a RAID controller card to my build which is detailed here.

The LSI MegaRAID SAS 8344ELP PCI-Express card:


This card is on both the VMware.com HCL and the vm-help.com HCL. I found the card new on eBay and was able to buy it for $95 shipped. It came with the driver CD from LSI, which was not needed for ESXi 4.1 because the drivers are already included in the system.

Install was very simple and only took about 10 minutes. I used this 3Ware cable purchased from Newegg.com (thanks Dave!).

I setup my 2x1TB WD Caviar Blue HDD as RAID-1. The most difficult part of the process was typing CNTL-H fast enough during bootup to get into the LSI RAID configuration software.

The only negative I know of with this controller is it has a 3 Gb/s transfer rate, and the drives are capable of 6 Gb/s. My system is not I/O intensive so it probably won't matter much to me and the price was certainly right.

Cheers,
Jake

I just thought of a question for anyone who may know:

If I lose one of the HDD in my RAID-1, will I see an alarm or some other type of event notification in ESXi?

Thanks.

With an LSI card you should see the health status of the controller in Configuration > Health Status. vCenter includes alarms which you won't have with a stand alone host, but you could script a check to alert you.

Excellent! Thanks Dave, I found it: