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A disk array controller is a device which manages the physical disk drives and presents them to the computer as logical units. It almost always implements hardware RAID, thus it is sometimes referred to as RAID controller. It also often provides additional disk cache. A ''disk array controller'' name is often improperly shortened to a ''disk controller''. The two should not be confused as they provide very different functionality. == Front-end and back-end side == A disk array controller provides front-end interfaces and back-end interfaces. * Back-end interface communicates with controlled disks. Hence protocol is usually ATA (a.k.a. PATA; incorrectly called IDE), SATA, SCSI, FC or SAS. * Front-end interface communicates with a computer's host adapter (HBA, Host Bus Adapter) and uses: * * one of ATA, SATA, SCSI, FC; these are popular protocols used by disks, so by using one of them a controller may transparently emulate a disk for a computer * * somewhat less popular protocol dedicated for a specific solution: FICON/ESCON, iSCSI, HyperSCSI, ATA over Ethernet or InfiniBand A single controller ''may'' use different protocols for back-end and for front-end communication. Many enterprise controllers use FC on front-end and SATA on back-end. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Disk array controller」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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