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What is Virtual Drive?

Virtual drive: A virtual drive in computing is a device that to the operating system appears to be an ordinary physical disk drive, with disc images substituted for disc reading hardware through the use of software called a disk emulator.

A virtual drive may emulate any type of physical drive, such as a hard drive, tape drive, key drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD/BD/HD DVD or a network share among others. An emulated drive is typically created either in RAM for fast read/write access (known as a RAM disk), or on a hard drive. 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").

Some operating systems such as Linux[1] and Mac OS X[2] have virtual drive functionality built-in (see loop device), while others such as Microsoft Windows require additional software.

Virtual drives are typically read-only, being used to mount existing disk images which are not modifiable by the drive.

However some software provides virtual CD/DVD drives which can produce new disk images; this type of virtual drive goes by a variety of names, including "virtual burner".

WinISO Standard 6 can be as a virtual drive.Click here to get more information.

 

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