Not everything was rosy in the land of ATA RAID, however. The FastTrak series of controllers - as well as offerings from Iwill, AMI, and HighPoint - strove for low cost in an effort to appeal to the desktop market. As a result, it´s no surprise that performance issues have been at the forefront of discussion. Some claim that these low-end ATA RAID cards do little for real-world performance, while others insist that significant performance gains are indeed realizable. Furthermore, whether or not these cards are even "true" hardware RAID also continues to be a cause of much debate -- some say that a card must have an on-board RISC processor to be considered a hardware implementation.

With all of the above in mind, the introduction of undeniably "true" hardware controllers - complete with on-board processors, several independent ATA channels, a higher price tag, and, in some cases, on-board cache - was inevitable. Indeed, Promise, 3Ware, and Adaptec have since introduced their own line of hardware-based ATA RAID controllers.