SlashGear

1. 

   Chris Davies
   

   Reputation:6,168

    

   Japanese accessory manufacturer Umazone have outdone themselves with a hard-drive caddy that will likely strike a chord with anyone doing regular software installs.  The Umazone UMA-ISO looks like a regular 2.5-inch HDD drive enclosure; however it also has a small display and, on the side, a jog wheel, which can be used to flick through ISO CD and DVD images stored on the drive inside.  Once selected, plugging the UMA-ISO into a host computer is pretty much the same as dropping the original disc into a CD/DVD drive.

   

   
   Full Story: Umazone UMA-ISO automatically mounts your DVD images

   Posted 3 months ago #
2. 

   melstav
   Member

   Reputation:1

    

   Actually, this is the I-Odd enclosure by CNS Korea.

   The things are AWESOME! They have a few annoyances about them, like the fact that the ISOs have to be in a particular directory on the first partition of the drive (which has to be formatted FAT32) for the thing to find them. And the fact that Windows’ built-in format utility doesn’t like to format USB drives > 32 GB as FAT32. (but there are ways around that) If you have an ISO that’s > 4GB, all you have to do is split the file into chunks that are 4GB in size or less.

   Since the thing shows up on the USB bus as both a hard drive AND an optical drive, when you select and ISO to be loaded into the “Virtual” optical drive, as far as the BIOS is concerned, you have an optical drive attached to the USB bus that has a disk in it. Which means, as long as the computer’s BIOS supports booting from a USB CD/DVD/BD-ROM, you *CAN* boot your computer to an ISO stored on the I-Odd. And, yes, the thing CAN handle Blu-Ray ISOs.

   And you can use them with any computer that can read and write FAT32 filesystems to put ISO images on the drive. Any OS with USB support should be able to see whatever CD/DVD/BD-Rom you have loaded into the virtual optical drive. (assuming your OS also has drivers for whatever filesystem is on the disk) And any computer with USB CDROM support in the BIOS should be able to boot from a disk loaded into the “virtual” optical drive.

   Posted 3 months ago #

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