some questions about raid card

I have some questions about raid card.

Use LSI MegaRAID® SAS 9260-8i raid card as a example.

There is only two connection ports on the raid card, and they provide two cables that can connect 8 SAS/SATA storages.
The document say it can connect "Maximum 32 drives per controller",
I want to know how can I connect more than 8 hard disks with this card.

Is that they say "Eight internal SATA+SAS ports" means they provide two cables which can connect 8 hard drives, but you can use other way to connect Maximum 32 drives?

The other question. I see host bus adapter has raid integrated , so what is the difference between host bus adapter and raid card. Are they the same?

I also know is SAS/SATA Expander's function only to connect more hard drives?

Thanks in advance.

Answer

This is easier than it seems, and you're already onto the solution.

Basically it has two channels of 6Gbps each, each connector can have a 1-into-4 cable pugged into it going off to either a single drive or an expander, each expander capable of supporting 0-4 drives. This is how you'd get to 32 drives, through the use of expanders.

Oh and at its simplest a HBA converts back and forth between the system and its disks while a RAID card does the same but more - it lets you bunch up disks into virtual disks of various types of array (R0/1/3/4/5/6/10/50/60 etc).