I'm seeing prices from $10 to over $100...

How much should I spend for a reliable RAID controller card?

(Want to set up RAID 1 with 2 HDDs).

I guess for what?
home pc you are just doing the os?

work pc must be up 24/7?

I have also read some odd reviews, like it never rebuilds, or took out both drives etc..

more than one of those, or sometimes just one review like that, and I never look at those cards again. sometimes the company.

This is on a home system, primarily for educational/lab purposes.  

What you are paying for in a RAID card is the chipset, the amount of onboard memory and in the higher end cases a battery to keep the chipset memory intact in case the system looses power. I haven't looked at RAID cards lately but the last one I bough for myself was a 6 port LSI SATA1 card, it cost me close to 400 bucks. At the time it had a lot of ram, no battery, but could do most of the RAID types available at the time. The good cards will give you RAID that is much more reliable than the built in raid motherboards have. I never have anything but trouble in desktop systems using onboard RAID after they have been going more than a year, especially the intel solutions. My next build will include a 8 to 10 port RAID card with battery.