QNAP NAS also does DAS via Thunderbolt

If you look through the scores of online forums where Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems are discussed, one of the most common user “wants” is for a NAS to simultaneously be a DAS (Direct Attached Storage). It’s a functionality that, at first blush, you might think easy to achieve but it turns out that it really isn’t because it’s not been an available option from any major NAS vendor. 

I first discovered the market’s desire for a combined NAS and DAS when I was editing video and wondered if I could use the eSATA interface on the QNAP NAS I had in the Gibbs Universal Secret Underground Bunker. It turned out that, in common with other vendors’ implementations, the QNAP’s eSATA ports were host-only interfaces which meant they could only connect to a slave drive.

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