Direct Attached Storage

Direct Attached Storage (DAS) describes data carriers (individual, RAID or JBOD) located in a separate, non-network-oriented housing that is connected to a single computer. By definition, this also includes regular commercially available external hard disks and requires a direct point-to-point connection of the two devices without any further nodes on the transmission path. This is also one of the core differences to Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN), even if DAS devices are used as a point-to-point capacity expansion for them.

DAS device interfaces:

• SCSI/SAS
• ATA/ATAPI
• FireWire
• eSATA
• USB
• SATA 3 (expansion NAS/SAN)
• PCI Express (expansion NAS/SAN)