Virtual drive

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
Any unsourced material that has been or is likely to be challenged may be removed at any time.
This article has been tagged since January 2007.

A virtual drive is a term used with respect to computers when a drive is emulated in some fashion. The drive being emulated could be a hard drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD or a network share among others.

A virtual hard drive can be created from RAM for fast read/write access. See: RAM disk. As well, there is software that makes one's Gmail account act as a virtual external drive.

Virtual DVD or CD drives are often mounted disk images via disk image emulator software. This allows one to read a CD or DVD from the disk image that is usually located on the hard drive, rather than from the disc drive. This allows users to run software requiring the CD or DVD without having to swap discs, or even possess it.

[edit] Virtual Burner

Please help improve this article by expanding this section.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. Please remove this message once the section has been expanded.
This article has been tagged since January 2007.

A Virtual CD Burner is a device driver that emulates a CD/DVD Burner. It appears as another drive in the system with writing capabilities. When information is written to the drive, it creates an ISO Image representation of the CD that would, under normal circumstances, be physically created.

This allows you to use any CD burning software to create what can be later mounted as a virtual drive.

[edit] Known programs that support Virtual Burning

Virtual CD by H+H Software GmbH, as of version 8.0

[edit] External links

Daemon Tools - free emulator
CD Emulator - free virtual CD-ROM program for Windows® XP (and unofficially Windows® 2000) from Microsoft.
OnlineDrive - file management, viewer and sharing application with data center levels of file protection.
RoamDrive - free Windows® application to use a web-based e-mail services to store files.
Virtual CD - H+H Software GmbH website
WebDrive - virtual drive connection to SFTP, FTP, and WebDAV servers.
Floppy Drive Emulator - free virtual Floppy Drive program for Windows® NT/2000/XP/2003. It only works on 32 bit systems.