Virtual Drives

[Kryten]

Right, many of you will no doubt have either heard of or used Daemon Tools in the past - mainly for allowing you to "mount" an image of a DVD or CD stored on your hard drive, which then shows up in my computer as a CD/DVD drive with that disc inserted.
I'm hunting around for the possibility of a hardware version. I know of the existance of a (very expensive) Scsi version (iScsi if you're interested, terrible name) - I'm more specifically hunting for an SATA counterpart.

Idea behind the iScsi I looked at was having a small array of large drives (the one I'm working on in the workshop is 5 x 300gb scsi u320 units) - the same box has a DVD reader in it - without the PC connected, you can insert a disc, let it do it's business, couple of minutes later disc is ejected and an image is created on the drives. Hooked up via a fast ethernet connection and with small client software on the PC's, this then shows up as a drive - like a remote version of Daemon Tools.

I'm looking for this because we're unfortunately having to move back into the in-law's poxy little flat, and we've very, very little room to do anything - and somewhere to centralise all my dvd's and cd's other than large optical jukeboxes would be ideal - but can't seem to find this sort of thing around, unless I want to deal with scsi drives - which I don't.

Anyone seen this sort of thing around and any idea of cost? Does such a thing even exist?

 

[WPKenny]

Why can't you just use your own machine to rip images to NAS and mount the images via the network? It's essentially the same thing.

 

[Kryten]

That's a *lot* of main-machine time as well as a lot of processing dumped on the machine also - wouldn't normally be an issue but the machine is being the main workhorse for the whole famliy when the move is completed. But, I wasn't aware you could mount over the network in such a way - may well be something to look at if I can't find this.

The hardware exists, just not sure if it exists for SATA stuff :/

 

[yaruar]

Right, many of you will no doubt have either heard of or used Daemon Tools in the past - mainly for allowing you to "mount" an image of a DVD or CD stored on your hard drive, which then shows up in my computer as a CD/DVD drive with that disc inserted.
I'm hunting around for the possibility of a hardware version. I know of the existance of a (very expensive) Scsi version (iScsi if you're interested, terrible name) - I'm more specifically hunting for an SATA counterpart.

Idea behind the iScsi I looked at was having a small array of large drives (the one I'm working on in the workshop is 5 x 300gb scsi u320 units) - the same box has a DVD reader in it - without the PC connected, you can insert a disc, let it do it's business, couple of minutes later disc is ejected and an image is created on the drives. Hooked up via a fast ethernet connection and with small client software on the PC's, this then shows up as a drive - like a remote version of Daemon Tools.

I'm looking for this because we're unfortunately having to move back into the in-law's poxy little flat, and we've very, very little room to do anything - and somewhere to centralise all my dvd's and cd's other than large optical jukeboxes would be ideal - but can't seem to find this sort of thing around, unless I want to deal with scsi drives - which I don't.

Anyone seen this sort of thing around and any idea of cost? Does such a thing even exist?

iSCSI is a protocol and not a device, it's really just an effecient way of encapsulating data. I've only ever seen it in SAN presentation. I've never seen it used to present ISO images as drives remotely and wouldn't be sure that it could actually do it. I'm not sure it would be the best solution anyway.
There isn't really a practical way you can mount a large amount of ISO's on a machine.
Microsoft produce mounting software for XP
which will allow you to mount a few, and then i guess you could mount them and then share the mount across the network. If you want to do a lot and have a hugely powerful machine you could in theory set up vmware server and run multipe virtual machines, but that would be rather silly.

 

[Kryten]

I'll grab the name of the device I've got at work that does it via scsi - I assumed "iScsi" was the model number as it's printed on the back of the controller section. It's serving me in 2 ways on my workstation - firstly it provides 5 images for PXE booting (diagnostic software, secure data wiping software, RIS images etc) as well as storing roughly 10 other images - although these are all permanently mounted as drives on my machine - other network users can mount them at a couple of clicks for their own use. The main reason for this in the warehouse/workshop was to cut down on the amount of blank CDs we go through due to heavy usage & loss. It's also a little quicker than most CD drives over gigabit ethernet!

As I said, I'm just wanting to be able to store away just shy of 100 CDs and 50 DVDs. Actually, many of the CDs can just be ripped to mp3 or something, but the idea still remains the same - 50 DVD's and the remaining CD games take a lot of room up.

Maybe it's worth me looking into building this sort of thing specifically for purpose - may also be worth marketing!

 

[yaruar]

I'll grab the name of the device I've got at work that does it via scsi - I assumed "iScsi" was the model number as it's printed on the back of the controller section. It's serving me in 2 ways on my workstation - firstly it provides 5 images for PXE booting (diagnostic software, secure data wiping software, RIS images etc) as well as storing roughly 10 other images - although these are all permanently mounted as drives on my machine - other network users can mount them at a couple of clicks for their own use. The main reason for this in the warehouse/workshop was to cut down on the amount of blank CDs we go through due to heavy usage & loss. It's also a little quicker than most CD drives over gigabit ethernet!

As I said, I'm just wanting to be able to store away just shy of 100 CDs and 50 DVDs. Actually, many of the CDs can just be ripped to mp3 or something, but the idea still remains the same - 50 DVD's and the remaining CD games take a lot of room up.

Maybe it's worth me looking into building this sort of thing specifically for purpose - may also be worth marketing!

Sounds like an odd setup, it would be easier just to dump the contents of a cd/dvd to a volume and share that across the network rather than dumping an ISO, mounting it and then sharing it, the extra overhead seems unnecessary. I can kind of see the point if you are doing it with films/cd's although i do wonder if you could legally do it to an ISO, again, it's more time consuming, but in the long run (illegally) ripping the dvd's to a mpeg would seem an easier way, in which case you could just share out the drive with the stuff on.

 

[Kryten]

Aye, but as I said, that's gonna take a *long* time to do from my main box - the whole idea is to move as much processing away from the main box as possible so normal usage can continue.

All options are still open naturally, it may well still come to doing that - even if I borrow a laptop or something to do the processing.

 

[babs]

I'm not sure it ticks all the boxes, but have a look at Media Portal. It's good for sorting and organising media, and has support for daemon tools/iso images. Quite how well it's integrated is another matter, but by the looks of the forums over there you're far from the first person wanting to do this.