Introduction

Greetings. I want to discuss Direct Attached Storage (DAS). What it is and why you might need it.

In my current situation I am living off a laptop, with a couple of DAS devices. Both devices cost about the same. However one is solid state and much faster. The other is mechanical and much larger.

Probably, the vast majority of people using computers may only need DAS, and not any sort of network solution.

Flash Drives have gotten very large lately. They sort of took over DAS from cdrom/dvrom once they hit 8 GB and bigger. And I know people who use flash drives, and SD cards, as many laptops have a SD slot built in.

There are external hard drives. TB of inexpensive storage. One just needs to chose between mechanical and solid state. Solid state is faster, but mechanical is still cheaper per GB.

Then there are a wide variety of options for using internal drives externally. USB to SATA, and multi bay drives, some even supporting hardware RAID. Though these options loose something in the form of portability.

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