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Direct attached storage (DAS) devices are designed to create easily expandable and secure data storage devices. They usually feature multiple drives, and unlike standard portable or desktop external drives, they feature RAID protection options and hot-swap capabilities for reducing down time should drive failure occur. They are designed to address the needs of professional home users or small business so they usually feature larger total capacities.

These DAS devices connect to a single computer via USB, eSATA, SATA or SAS, however if shared access is required you should consider a Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution.

Direct attached storage (DAS) devices are designed to create easily expandable and secure data storage devices. They usually feature multiple drives, and unlike standard portable or desktop external drives, they feature RAID protection options and hot-swap capabilities for reducing down time should drive failure occur. They are designed to address the needs of professional home users or small business so they usually feature larger total capacities.

These DAS devices connect to a single computer via Thunderbolt, however if shared access is required you should consider a Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution.

External storage devices provide a quick and easy way to expand the data storage of your PC or and laptop.

These external enclosures are unpopulated so you can install your choice of M.2 SATA or NVMe SSD. Most use USB 3.0 / 3.1 connections at up to 5Gb/s or USB 3.2 at up to 10Gb/s, or Thunderbolt connections at up to 40Gb/s, and many include backup applications and cloud subscriptions for added security.

A storage controller is a hardware device used to manage HDDs or SSDs in a server or storage array. While all motherboards include a basic storage controller built into the chipset, it is commonplace to add a third party storage controller if you need extra capacity or want to configure them in RAID to protect data.

A Host Bus Adapter (HBA) is an expansion card that plugs into a PCIe slot on the system’s motherboard and provides fast, reliable communication between the host system and the storage devices. HBAs can reliably connect hundreds or even thousands of HDDs, SSDs and even tape devices to the host system, making them ideal for cost-sensitive backup solutions or high-performance software defined storage (SDS) configurations.

Here you will find various adaptors and other miscellaneous equipment for internal SSDs and HDDs to help adapt them to your requirements.

SSDs (Solid State Drives) are the fastest type of data storage device, cutting game and application load times while boosting overall system responsiveness versus HDDs (Hard Disk Drives). SSDs are more resilient and consume less power than HDDs, making them an ideal choice for laptops.

Add-in-card SSDs are ideal for desktop PCs, connecting directly to the motherboard using an PCIe slot. These particular PCIe slot SSDs communicate at up to 63,200MB/s making them the fastest possible SSDs available.

You can check the compatibility of these SSDs with your system in your component documentation or our buyers guide.

A storage controller is a hardware device used to manage HDDs or SSDs in a server or storage array. While all motherboards include a basic storage controller built into the chipset, it is commonplace to add a third party storage controller if you need extra capacity or want to configure them in RAID to protect data.

A RAID controller card is similar to a Host Bus Adapter (HBA), but can also add redundancy (RAID) for the drives, help optimise performance, reduce latency, or even make smart decisions on whether to store data on an HDD or an SSD cache, depending on user needs. Since these additional tasks consume power and processing speed, RAID controllers are typically more expensive than HBAs and handle fewer devices. They are however recommended where data is critical and needs some degree of protection and in scenarios where different drive types are being used such as a single array containing SSDs for regularly accessed data and HDDs for archive purposes.

The controller cards in this category provide storage speeds far in advance of the standard SATA ports inside desktop PCs and office workstations. These products are mid-range components with four connectors.

These eight-port storage controller cards offer more versatility than many of their counterparts and can be used to configure RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and JBOD arrays. They're low-profile cards that use PCI-E connections, so can be fitted to most PCs without conflicting with other hardware.

Data cables are an essential part of any PC build, connecting internal components or external devices, allowing transfer of data and power.

These SAS cables provide a data connection from the motherboard to SAS HDDs and SSDs.

USB is the most common bus used to connect a huge variety of external devices to PCs, laptops and servers. It is not only used by peripherals such as keyboards and mice, but also storage devices such as external drives, smartphone and tablets and more.

These PCIe cards add extra USB 3.1 (up to 10Gb/s) or USB 3.2 ports (up to 10Gb/s) ports to your PC.

USB cables transfer data such as text, images, AV signals from one device to another. They may either have the same connectors at each end or convert between different types of port. Originating in 1996, since then USB has evolved into various revisions, adding support for progressively higher transfer rates.

These USB 3.1 and 3.2 cables support throughput at up to 10Gbps or 20Gbps respectively using either the large Type-A connector and/or one of the smaller connectors. Please note a USB 3.2 port will be limited to 10Gbps using Type-A connector, so make sure to you choose a Type-C connector for full performance.