I thought I knew the difference between HBA and RAID.
In my mind, HBA is offloading from the main motherboard/CPU and is simply JBOD… usually has an external SAS ports, whilst a RAID card does the same job as HBA but adds all the nice RAID levels and possibly battery backup + other benefits.
After looking at the LSI website for a product, I see that they have HBA cards that have built in RAID, for example the LSI SAS 9211-8i Host Bus Adapter.
So… Clearly I am wrong!
What is the difference between an HBA card and a RAID card?
Best Answer
HBA just means 'host bus adapter', so it's anything that lets you connect to an external bus (although usually the term is applied to a something that lets you connect storage).
You might put one in to fit an external tape drive, or a SAN storage array. Usually, as in this case, it means the card isn't that intelligent. It supports only the simple types of RAID 0, 1, 10, and no onboard cache. So, I think you are more right than wrong.