Today I like to show a awesome piece of Hardware which is one of the most valuable things I ever bought.
What is it ? It is a external HDD case with awesome features.
First of all, you never need to burn a CD or DVD image, this device will emulate a virtual DVD Rom that is pointing to a ISO file.
At the same time you can have the HDD conected like a external Disk, this is very useful if you need special drivers during setup.
What comes handy that you can Write Protect this disk while it is connected. So next time you fix someones Computer you can plug this device in with all Tools you need but don’t need to be worried that you carry a Virus back home.
Well so far not convinced ? and you think this is just for Nerds and Linux Users ? Wrong, I have installed a lot of Windows Systems with an ISO of a Windows installation DVD and it is really fast. A normal Windows 7 installation will take ( depending on the HDD you put in ) 30 min. due to the fact that there is no optical device to be positioned and this is reducing the installation time a lot.
I have setup a 1TB HDD in this Case and use it for my IT-Support with ISO images for Windows and Linux, but also appliances can be updated or installed.
Well, did you ever stand in front of a well designed Server Rack and need to update some firmware with no internet connection or remote capabilities ?
And did you ever try to do an upgrade with a USB DVD ? Sometimes it takes hours that all components are loaded from the DVD, or you find out that you need to burn a new DVD by the fact that someone had downloaded or burned the wrong ISO.
Here you can Reduce the time that a technician is in the Datacenter or having issues to have the wrong image burned he just have them all on Disk.
Even when you use this device just as a external HDD there is an additional feature that may be useful, the disk can be encrypted by a pin.
So when this disk is lost no one will be able to access the data on the disk.
There is no vs. of these Devices Zalman is a reseller in Europe but IODD is the OEM Vendor for this.
The Zalman ZM-VE400
Due to the redesign of this device, there are some differences between the old ZM-VE400 and the device from IODD directly.
First IODD have only a webpage in English or Chinese and also firmware updates and Documentation is not easy to find.
Second IODD has added a recovery Button when the firmware update goes wrong.
Despite from that the new firmware holds a few more features related to virtual Disks so also VMDK or other formats can be used on the IODD device.