Comment by alphager

7 months ago

I just use an enclosure that emulates a dvd-drive. Put a cheap SATA ssd in there and you can stop worrying about incompatibilities.

16 comments

alphager

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metadat  7 months ago

How do you image the SSD? Isn't it kind of the same issue as with imaging a USB stick?

  • doubled112  7 months ago

    You don't image it. You drag and drop ISOs into a directory on the SSD, and the USB device emulates a DVD ROM drive with the contents. You choose the ISO through a small screen and button on the device.

  • burnt-resistor  7 months ago

    With the iODD 2531: It has modes: CD, HDD, and dual. CD provides emulation only. HDD and dual expose an FAT32 drive volume that can contains a magic _ISO directory to store .iso's. One limitation though is it doesn't support fragmented (discontinuous) files, and so those need to be minimally defragmented occasionally.

    • winkelmann  7 months ago

      It also has an issue with remembering the last mounted .iso if its filename is beyond a certain length, in which case it will instead load a random (although always the same) .iso in the same folder.

      I mainly had this issue with the default Windows install image names.

      Fragmentation can be a bit annoying, especially when using exFAT, which doesn't appear to have defragmentation tools available. It can be avoided by never deleting files and instead reformatting every so often.

      That being said, it's still a fantastic tool because all the images "just work" everywhere a class-compliant USB optical drive would.

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