ST400 2.5 inch Enclosure/USB-C/Bootable Virtual ODD&HDD / AES256 Encryption Max up to 76 Digits/Write Protect / 2541(ST400/USB-C Type/Next Gen Model) Made in Korea

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 device works great. So far I've installed windows 11 and Armbianx86, each OS on its own .vhd. Windows 11 vhd booted fine first try. Initially I couldn't get Armbianx86 to boot. Turns out I had to disable secure boot even though it was a UEFI version of Armbianx86. I have two partitions on the drive. Each partition is selectable and can boot from vhd or iso. Lots of possibilities with this device. As others have said, the documentation is TERRIBLE! I had to play around with setting the USB/internal drive settings many times to get what they do. The "mode" CD, Dual or Hard Drive are apparently set by file name. Go to the IODD download site and download the vhd and util tools stuff and read through it and try to figure out what is relevant. I created vhd using Windows disk manager and IODD vhd tool. Creating a vhd in Windows takes a while. The IODD tool creates a vhd almost instantly. Both work fine. This is a fun and useful device. $90 seems a bit overpriced.

This device is very cool. It can act as a regular hard drive with partitions, various formats, etc. It can simulate a CD/DVD drive from an ISO file. It can simulate a flash drive from a VHD file. And, it can do combinations of all those things at the same time. For that, it is a very cool device and I'm happy with it. I'm not using encryption, so no comments about that. The things I don't like, but can tolerate... * The buttons are solid black and really hard to see the numbers/symbols on them. * The device "feels" a tad cheap - kind of a spongy plastic. * The UI is not intuitive to me at all. But, it is fairly basic and you'll eventually get the hang of it. * It does not remember what ISO or VHD was inserted when it loses power. This is highly annoying when trying to use this as a boot disk for something like installing an OS. It often loses power when rebooting your computer and then no longer looks like a boot disk when the computer starts up. * The on-device help and all the manuals are full of broken English and lack all sorts of details. It took me a while to realize you do most tasks from your OS, such as the initial format of the drive, creating flash VHDs, etc. * The device cannot create a VHD for you, so every time you want to create a 'fake' flash drive, you need to run a Windows app to create a VHD file, store it on the device's main hard drive, and then mount it from the device's LCD interface. It would be cool if the device could just generate and mount a blank VHD on the fly. * Only fixed size VHDs are supported, which potentially wastes a lot of space. You have to guess the max size flash drive to create for an image, and then live that decision regardless of how much data is copied to the flash drive. Maybe there are 3rd party tools that can shrink a VHD. What would be cool is if the device could support dynamic VHDs that grow as data is added to them.

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.

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.

The ST-400 is a great tool to have for random IT-related situations. It emulates as it should, its generally fast (with an SSD), and I'd say its good bang for the buck. Your storage is really only limited by the size of the drive you put in it (I bought the enclosure and driver separately). Installing the drive in the enclosure is straightforward, and I've yet to find a system it isn't compatible with. I've installed Nutanix, Windows, RHEL, VMWare, you name it and its probably compatible with it for emulating ISOs. That said, the system does have quirks. "Fragmented" volumes for both virtual USB drives and ISOs cause issues; as I understand it this really shouldn't be a snag when it comes to an SSD. I'd love to see some of this fixed in the firmware to better handle these things, or at least offer a better explanation of what the problem is on the device's screen. Ultimately, its a niche product that has its quirks, but if you know what you're doing and what you need it for, it'll certainly fill a distinct void missing in a lot of IT efforts.

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

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.

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.

I use this every day for work. Easy to use and works well. Takes a bit to figure out which has an online Wiki. I use this for multi booting and imaging devices.