Typical uses of virtual drives include the mounting of disk images of CDs and DVDs, and the mounting of virtual hard disks for the purpose of on-the-fly disk encryption ("OTFE"). An emulated drive is typically created either in RAM for fast read/write access (known as a RAM disk), or on a hard drive. It is also used to make perfect clones of hard disks.Ī virtual disk may emulate any type of physical drive, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, key drive, floppy drive, CD/ DVD/ BD/ HD DVD, or a network share among others and of course, since it is not physical, requires a virtual reader device matched to it (see below). Disk images became much more popular when floppy disk media became popular, where replication or storage of an exact structure was necessary and efficient, especially in the case of copy protected floppy disks.ĭisk images are used for duplication of optical media including DVDs, Blu-ray discs, etc. The early ones were as small as 5 megabytes and as large as 330 megabytes, and the copy medium was magnetic tape, which ran as large as 200 megabytes per reel. Disk images were originally (in the late 1960s) used for backup and disk cloning of mainframe disk media.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |