Question About Host Bus Adapters

[Arad Gonen]

Hi. I have a question about host bus adapter. 

What types of code run on these cards? 

[unijab]

HBAs have basically no raid features

[Mikensan]

Think of a HBA as just a pass through. 

[mineblaster]

hba's are like network adapters they can address from 256 drives from one adapter and up to 1000 drives on newer adapters.

most adapter can connect at least 8 drives natively and the additional drives via sas exspanders / backplanes .

the sas protocol also works with sata drives

raid cards can do the same (at least for LSI adapters)but large groups of drives in raid is not recommended 

 

the lsi utility shows them like this

and device manager

 

being able to hot swap drives is great too.