And now I almost forgot the
Daemon Tools, a virtual CD/DVD-ROM driver...
Quote:
DAEMON Tools is an advanced application for multiprotection emulation. It is further development of Generic Safedisc emulator and incorporates all its features. This program allows running Backup Copies of SafeDisc (C-Dilla), Securom, Laserlock, CDCOPS, StarForce and Protect CD (and many others) protected games. Also included is a Virtual DVDROM drive (Generic DVD-ROM) enabling you to use your CD images as if they were already burned to CD! DAEMON Tools works under Windows9x/ME/NT/2000/XP with all types of CD/DVDROM drives (IDE/SCSI) and supports nearly any CD protection.
And the products based on it (if you are on a network)
Starport & Starwind.
Quote:
StarPort is a complete iSCSI initiator, RAM disk and virtual DVD emulator implementation for Windows. ... StarPort enhances Windows sharing of storage subsystem over an existing IP network dealing as client software pairing iSCSI targets. ... This software package combined with StarWind working as server allows you to:
- share CD/DVD burners over the network and use your favorite CD/DVD burning application ... to burn CD/DVD remotely
- share tape drives over the network and use your favorite tape backup application ... to backup to tape drive remotely
- share hard disk drives over the network for fast storing large amounts of data (replication) at block-level rather then doing this at file-level
- backup whole server storage subsystem over the network w/o putting machine down
- work with the virtual volumes, dynamic volume snapshots, incremental backups
- create extremely fast RAM disk drives for temporary data storing
- mount standard ISO and MDS images into created Virtual DVD drives
Key features:
- All SCSI devices (actually any devices with SCSI-like drivers: Serial and Parallel ATA and SCSI, Fibre Channel, USB and FireWire) are supported for sharing (hard disk, CD/DVD, tape, processor etc)
- iSCSI draft 20 used to talk to remote machine (interoperability allows to mix different operating systems at both sides)
- Extremely high speed, nearly no difference between local and remote SCSI device (if supported by network hardware, GbE is strongly recommended however 100 megabits networks work fine most of tasks)
- Local RAM disks have very powerful backup capabilities
- Fast DVD drives mapped to ISO or MDS image files