I believe that's what I said. The hard disk controller is a chip packaged with the hard drive. The CPU talks to the hard disk controller to get data from the

I believe that's what I said. The hard disk controller is a chip packaged with the hard drive. The CPU talks to the hard disk controller to get data from the disk, with IDE commands or something like that. I think controllers used to be dedicated circuitry, but now they are more like CPUs with firmware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller_(computing) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller_(computing) In a modern computer, there are dozens of these little chips, each having security implications. Nobody knows the provenance of all the code since they are mostly manufactured overseas.