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Not quite vintage, but useful - USB HD that mounts ISOs and emulates optical drives.

A

Anonymous Freak

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http://www.megatechnews.com/megatech-reviews-zalman-zm-ve200-external-hdd-case-and-virtual-drive/

It's a fairly standard 2.5" SATA-to-eSATA-or-USB enclosure, with one major difference...

It can natively read ISO files stored on the drive, and will emulate a USB optical drive. It has a small LCD panel and 'scroll wheel' type control so you can pick which ISO file you want it to mount. That could be *VERY* useful for system administrators who may need to have access to multiple bootable optical discs.

It also made me think of the VC community for being similar to some vintage-computing efforts under way to achieve a similar device for floppy disk images.
 
I've had one of these for almost a year now and find it extremely useful. I've taken stacks of CDs, created ISO images and copied them to this drive. No need for stacks of CDs anymore!

It actually has 3 modes, HDD - a regular external USB hard drive, ODD - emulates an optical drive, DUAL - where it acts simultaneously as an HDD and an ODD.

In case anyone needs a little clarification as to why this thing is fantastic, if the ISO image you select is a bootable image, you can actually boot from the image. There are a number of apps out there that will let you mount an ISO as a virtual drive but the problem with them is that you have to boot the OS first in order to mount the image. This device mounts the image irrespective of the OS so you can boot from it just as if it was a CD/DVD in a physical drive.

BTW, I didn't have any of the issues the author of the above article had with mine.
 
Your link looks like a re-branded version of the iodd Virtual ROM. I bought my first one of these almost two years ago now. I also bought one for use at work. It works amazingly well for system imaging because you just boot off your virtual CD then have the hard drive space available to image your system. I'd highly suggest this to anyone who is looking for a good virtual CD/DVD device. :)

Heather
 
Were this parallel ATA, it would be extremely useful for vintage computing. Just think of all the CD-ROMs you could read off it. It certainly beats using Daemon Tools in a semi-vintage Windows machine. Also, since it uses ISO, it cannot truly support mixed mode CDs, of which there were many.
 
Thank you all for this discussion...without the thread, I wouldn't know that it exist. My order for a Zalman ZM-VE300 is now in place and should expect it in a few days.

Just a note: Local dealers do not carry this on stock. It seems none of the sales know about it as well.

Heather: Thanks for the link on the Zalman...used it to show to my supplier...
 
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