Virtual DVD Drive CloneDrive

Using virtual dvd drives can be a very effective way of storing multiple DVDs on computer hard drives. The procedure offers several advantages for the user: among the advantages are options to make select discs permanently available on the system without needing the actual physical discs in reach. This can be very useful for laptops for example but also for stationary use. Not only can you access the contents faster, as disk access is a lot faster than reading contents from DVDs even if you do not have to swap them due to the limited number of DVD drives installed on the system, but you can also use it to protect the original discs in the process.

Another advantage is that you can encrypt the full hard drive and all data on it, while it may be difficult to do the same for DVDs that you carry with you.

Virtual CloneDrive is a free application from the makers of AnyDvd and CloneDvd. It supports a maximum of eight virtual dvd drives that can be used to mount various image formats such as iso, bin and img. The main design concept of the software has been simplicity as it is dead easy to use but efficient in what it does nevertheless. You can assign the supported disc image formats to the Virtual Clone Drive application, which enables you to mount them with a double-click if that is the case. It may not the the optimal solution though as you may want to keep the iso images mapped to your disc burning software of choice instead.

The only other way to mount images is to right-click one of the virtual dvd drives and pick one of the supported image formats from the hard drive afterwards.

It acts as a normal dvd drive afterwards with the added bonus that the speed is usually much higher and less error prone.