What is the function of a controller card?

[gracious]

greetings and Salutations,
Can anyone please explain to me what a controller card does? I have a Gateway Performance XL computer which has a Promise Ultra ATA66 controller card on it which I notice the HDD ide cable is connected to this and not on the ide slot on the mobo. My cdrom and cdrw are also connected to it on the second connector. Also, is a raid card also a controller card and is it the same thing as what I have or is it different.

Thank you
Gracious:p

[Budfred]

Usually people use a controller card to create more IDE ports or to speed up the function of the drives on a computer. If I have an ATA100 drive and the native IDE ports on the computer can only do ATA66, I can use a controller card to get the drives up to full speed. I have one in my HP because I had 3 optical drives and it wasn't working well to have one on the same IDE cable with my hard drive. With the controller card, each drive has its own port. An ATA66 controller card would not be the same as a RAID card.

Budfred

[Sylvander]

Your controller card SUPPLEMENTS the Primary and Secondary IDE Controllers.
If you only had one drive on each controller then all three drives could be active con[cur]rently.
That is:
Running alongside each other like curs [curr-murring, gr(rr-h)owling dogs][all active at once].

This is totally different from RAID.

Here’s what my dictionary says about:
RAID
Redundant Array of Independent [and inexpensive] Disks.
A group of Hard Disks under the control of “Array Management Software” that work together to improve performance and decrease the odds of losing data due to mechanical or electronic failure by using such techniques such as “Data Striping”.
Because of their complexity and steep cost, RAID implementations are most often used on network servers.
Several RAID levels exist, each with advantages and disadvantages.
RAID arrays are generally used for high volume servers.

I take it that the idea is that you can afford to lose one or more HDD’s without causing too many problems.
The array appears as though a single, large, fast, super reliable HDD.
It improves reliability, response time and/or storage capacity.
To do this it uses techniques called:
“Spanning” or “Software Striping”, “Mirroring”, “Duplexing”, “Hot Swapping”, “Hot Sparing” & “Spindle Synchronization”.

Now we REALLY do NOT want to go into that lot do we?