IODD ST400 Variations (NO SSD) by iodd

So, this is about the only device on the market that plugs into a USB port and emulates a CD-ROM drive, a hard drive, a flash drive, or a floppy disk drive (no kidding!) with disk images. The manufacturer seems to think you’ll do something else with it, some kind of weird windows stuff I have no idea about and don’t care about, but in reality this is an amazing way to get hardware emulation with disk images. It even has a little screen with a UI to configure it and choose images.

Unfortunately, the documentation that comes with it is complete and utter garbage. It’s totally worthless. Eventually you stumble around on the manufacturer’s site and find online docs that are slightly better, though still pretty bad. In those docs you find a link to a wiki that adds just a couple of the details you wish they had just come out and said in the first place. Instead, right out of the gate they give you these docs that assume you want to install some kind of sketchy Windows software to make disk images and manage some kind of weird windows boot thing.

It also covers a bunch of encryption and access control features that, honestly, are totally worthless. I can’t imagine ever putting any kind of trust in an encryption implementation in a no-name piece of hardware from a company I’ve never heard of that documents absolutely nothing and provides no source code. I’d trust that as much as I’d trust a TSA luggage lock.

On the other hand, it works and it works really well once you figure it out. The problem is, half the features are undocumented or only partially documented. The UI on the tiny built in screen is awful and you’re expected to navigate it with a number pad.

Now that I’ve done a bunch of griping, here’s the good stuff: once you figure it out and work out why it insists that you to use weird nonstandard file extensions for everything, you plug it in and you outright bamboozle your computer into thinking there’s a CD-ROM drive, floppy drive, or other block device attached. You can have more than one of those active at a time, and each of them is presented on the bus as a separate LUN. It supports large volumes (but does not support any modern filesystems — only FAT or NTFS filesystems work) and I had no trouble using it with an inexpensive 2TB SSD.

For all my complaining I give this thing ten stars, would buy again! There’s nothing else out there like it and I hope the manufacturer figures out that they are selling this thing the completely wrong way and to the wrong market. It’s a miracle machine like no other and with a little better understanding of what we want to use it for they’d really do well for themselves.

Excellent

Until I learned about this product on a YouTube video I was using Ventoy. The problem with Ventoy is that if you don’t watch your OS installation you can sometimes overwrite the flash drive. I accidentally did that twice and lost about 20 ISO files. I got tired of re-downloading all of them again. So this product is perfect because it allows you to have the same functionality of multiple ISO files available to boot from but you have the ability to lock the drive from accidental overwrites. It would be nice if the user interface was a little more customizable or had more options. It’s a full color display but could be so much more user friendly if it actually incorporated icons and logos and things like that. But just rating the product as it is and using it for a few months I can honestly say it’s about as perfect as you could ask for as far as ease of use and reliability. I basically always keep the drive as read only unless I’m copying or deleting new ISO files so that I prevent accidental overwrites.

Ever heard of Rufus? Windows app that makes it quick and easy to copy ISOs and images to a USB stick. Good for making Windows or Linux installers.

Notice how you can only do one OS at a time?

Ever heard of Ventoy? It’s a mini Linux bootloader that allows you to just drag and drop ISOs, VHDs, images, and etc to the usb drive, and boot from them in a list. So much more convenient, but then you have to hope Venroy both supports the ISO you’re trying to boot, AND hope it plays nice with your computer’s BIOS. Ventoy needs to be updated on the usb stick to ensure compatibility.

Notice how that adds a failure point and more finagling?

Here comes IODD with the easiest, yet most powerful, boot tool ever made. Slap a 2.5 inch drive in it (or perhaps an M.2 with a Sata adapter) and connect. The onboard screen will show you all the folders and files present. Select an ISO, VHD, image, or bin file, and it’ll put it in a virtual CD drive attached via USB. Boot from that natively, and you’re good to go!

You can drag and drop any file just like Ventoy. Use ISOs alongside your documents and data.

You can encrypt the drive with built in hardware acceleration. You can emulate floppy disks and internal AND external storage. You can set multiple users and add or remove access.

No IT tech should go without their IODD.

Ein echt cooles Werkzeug/Multitool für den interessierten PC Anwender. Die Bedienung ist ein bisschen tricky, da muss man sich etwas rein Fuchsen aber das Tool kann extrem viel und wenn man erst mal weiß wie es funktioniert, ist es doch recht einfach.