HBA or Controller Cards

Adapter Cards

Connect your system to storage and the network

Raid controllers
Host bus adapters
Serial Port Cards
PCI Cards
IDE, SATA, SCSI, SAS, Fibre Channel Cards

The controller card, or simply "controller," is a piece of hardware that acts as the interface between the motherboard and the other components of the computer. For example, hard drives, optical drives, printers, keyboards, and mice all require controllers to work. Most computers have all the necessary controllers built in the motherboard as chips, not full-sized cards. However, if you add additional components such as a SCSI hard drive, you may need to add a controller card as well. Controller cards are typically installed in one of the computer's PCI slots.

A host controller, host adapter, or host bus adapter (HBA) connects a host system, aka the computer to other network and storage devices. The terms are primarily used to refer to devices for connecting SCSI, Fibre Channel and eSATA devices, but devices for connecting to IDE, Ethernet, FireWire, USB and other systems may also be called host adapters. The past couple of years, the invention of iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet has brought about Ethernet HBAs, which are different from Ethernet NICs, (they include TCP Offload Engines). There are also converged HBAs that support both Ethernet and Fibre Channel.