An external hard drive is attached to a workstation to back up virtual machines for testing. What type of storage is this?

• A. NAS
• B. DAS
• C. SAN
• D. Cloud storage

Answer: (B)

Direct-Attached Storage is storage that’s connected directly to a single computer, with no intervening network. An external hard drive plugged into a workstation to back up virtual machines is exactly that: the drive is attached to and used by the workstation itself, not shared over a network.

NAS would involve a dedicated storage device on the network providing file-level access; SAN is a networked storage system that typically delivers block-level access to multiple servers; cloud storage is remote storage accessed over the internet. Because the drive in this scenario isn’t on a network or remotely accessed, it’s best described as Direct-Attached Storage.