Zalman ZM-VE200

Just got hold of a Zalman ZM-VE200 hard drive USB enclsoure which is pretty standard except for one thing - it can emulate an optical drive. As someone who  builds and upgrades systems on a regular basis at work and home this is phenomenally useful.

I ordered the drive from LinItx in the UK - it comes in black or silver, along with a Samsung M7 320GB laptop drive (since the enclosure takes 2.5-inch drives). The drive is nicely packaged and even includes a tiny screwdriver to fit the drive. Unfortunately, the device comes with practically no documentation so herewith are my discoveries.

• The drive can be partitioned but the first partition must be NTFS for optical emulation to work (you can use FAT32 but then you are limited to 4GB files which means you can't do many DVD images). I tried ext2 but it didn't work.
• The NTFS partition should have a folder called _iso - case is important. This is where you put the .iso images of the disks you want emulated.
• Image files must be unfragmented, so best to copy one-at-time or defrag after loading up. This is not documented but if you select a fragemented image the message DEFRAG appears on the LCD.
• Image filenames should only have a single dot in them - otherwise they are not recognised, since filenames are parsed to the first dot to determine extension. As I know Windows sometimes have this stupidity I can't compain,   
• You use the jog-wheel on the side to scroll through the images (which are displayed on a small LCD on the drive) and press it to select which one you want to mount. Subfolders are supported, selecting one opens it. There is a ".." entry to go up again.
• There is only a single USB connector on the drive cable - this means that some USB ports have trouble powering up the drive (the display flashes or you experience read-errors during optical drive emulation). However, I've not had a problem with laptop ports or ones on motherboard backplates.
• The drive is write-protectable, useful for using it for virus removal.
• Optical drive emulation works perfectly - it can be booted from to install machines from CD or DVD images. Allegedly, it can even emulate Blueray BD-ROM drives but I don't have such an image to hand.

All-in-all a very useful device and it means I can dispense with optical drives in my servers and (mostly) my laptops. It's smaller then the smallest slimline external optical drive too.