High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In mainframe computers and some minicomputers, a direct access storage device, or DASD (pronounced / dæzdi /), is any secondary storage device which has relatively low access time for all its capacity.The direct access capability, occasionally and incorrectly called random access (although that term survives when referring to memory or RAM), of those devices stood in contrast to sequential access used in tape drives. The latter required a proportionally long time to access a distant point in a medium.