IODD ST400 Variations (NO SSD)

This enclosure is great. It keeps your information secured until you provide the key and provides a great peace of mind for protecting your data in the event that you lose your device. The device comes with USB C which is a welcomed addition compared to some of their other product offerings. The enclosure is a good value if you are looking to have an added peace of mind if you ever lose your drive. While it won't prevent someone else from being able to use your drive, It will prevent them from being able to access what you lost. Drive powers up and is readily available for pin entry in less than 5 seconds from when the device is powered up. I do find that most computers will post and begin booting before you even have the change to unlock the drive and mount the ISO. Also, some computers interrupt USB power during a soft reset which can sometimes make it complicated to get your ISO to mount. There is a function that keeps the password cashed for two minutes which aims to alleviate this but I found that entering bios or pressing the pause print screen/scroll lock on the keyboard sometimes will pause the power on self test. This gives me time to enter my pin and mount my ISO. Or likewise, i'll enter the bios setup utility (mount my ISO) and immediately exit it without saving changes and my device will be ready to boot from. Something to keep in mind but all in all, a very useful enclosure and it does make safeguarding my files convenient.

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.

This thing is AMAZING if you do a lot of computer repair or not even huge volume but just want ease of storing multiple ISOs and encryption, lots of functions. If you're in IT, this will save you time and headache

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.

once you learn the UI (instructions plus a little trial and error, it's not too bad), it's great! I've tried ventoy and UNetbootin with mixed results (unable to boot on some systems, or certain ISOs). As a result, I still have a small fishing tackle case containing about (30) bootable flash drives: lots of live distos, OS installers, BIOS updaters, etc. Issue is that some Live USB sticks act like a bootable hdd, possibly with multiple partitions being presented, while others act like a CD/DVDROM. The IODD offers both, and is so much faster then a typical 8G flash drive, and, Huge Bonus: it can be write protected so that, when using it to boot an untrusted system, you don't have to worry about said system infecting your boot media.

A Fab piece of kit, allowing the use of Iso files to be added as a virtual cd rom drive makes my life as a Technician a dream. Put my own 1TB SSD in it and the USB 3.0 has a decent transfer speed.

Excelente, muy util para almacenar todos mis isos de sistemas operativos y para crear volumenes virtuales.

très bien

Excellent

Manualen är inget vidare men ge den en stund sen är den fantastisk. Varför släpa på en massa USB minnen när den här kan ersätta dem alla. Den dyker upp som en disk på datorn, som en CD/DVD/BR spelare och som upp till 3 USB/HD enheter, CD/DVD/BR pekar mot en ISO fil, på disken, USB/HD pekar mot viruella hårddiskar, de går att skrivskydda efter behov och avmontera och montera andra helt efter behov.