iodd 2541 USB 3.0 External Encrypted Hard Drive Enclosure [Virtual DVD Blu-ray ROM/VHD/Booting/SSD/HDD/2.5] Made in Korea (1 Unit / Lot)

I have yet to find an image that couldn't boot with this device.1. Presents itself to BIOS as both UEFI and non-UEFI CD/HD. The majority of the images booted fine, but for a couple I had to go to BIOS and disable Secure Boot, and/or enable the CSM (Compatibility Support Module). Nevertheless, boot was successful in ALL cases.2. The following ISOs/VHDs were tried and booted successfully: Windows 10, Windows 10 To Go (VHD), Kaspersky Rescue Disc, Acronis Bootable Media (Linux & PE), BitDefender Rescue CD, ESET SysRescue CD, Linux Mint/Fedora/Ubuntu/MX/Manjaro/OpenSUSE, NetBSD. FreeBSD boots but greets me with white screen. I don't think it has anything to do with the IODD. I haven't tried VMDK/DSK/IMA/RMA images.3. The preparation and boot speed for Windows 10 To Go is very good (I was using USB 3). Other USB sticks I tried to use for Windows To Go were extremely slow. Not this one! This one works great.4. Don't let a few English translation mistakes in the manual and the interface worry you. The product does it's job perfectly fine.5. The menu is a bit cumbersome to use, but you get the hang of it.

A great piece of tech kit that every geek should have. Very useful. Only issue is you have to use Windows to set it up or upgrade or even to defrag. Otherwise, it works well and I don't have to use so many USD flash drives for different OS to play with or setup a new computer or server.

Nice upgrade on the original IODD device I had and had to donate to a needy person (curse their soul). This one is encrypted and I have to admit, unlocking it is a little bit Mission Impossible (in the gadget sense, not the "I can't get in the thing!" sense. In retrospect, that was a bad comparison). Input the code to access will always sit well with meInputting the code is a bit slow as you can't just bip about this keypad. You need to be quite deliberate with keypresses. Using it is easy: Create a folder called _ISO and drop images in it. They then become available to the ODD featureOne thing baffles me: The activity LED is bright enough to communicate over great distances. Why? I had a floating purple squiggle for half a day the first time I used it. I would put tape over it but I'm worried the light intensity will cause the tape to ignite

The good:It does emulate 1 optical disk drive (CD, DVD or Bluray, depending on the .iso file size) and up to 4 hard drives at the same time, plus it can also present the underlying hard drive to the host computer, all at the same time through the single USB 3.0 Micro B connector. The encryption applies to the entire underlying hard drive, not individually to each image file.I had an issue with my product and the customer service rep was very helpful and he/she solved it right away - I really appreciated that, and it is the reason I'm writing this review.The enclosure came with two plastic screen protectors and a fold-out faux-leather cover which is a nice touch. It also came with a very nice looking USB 3.0 Micro B cable (my issue was related to this cable).There are though a few things that could be improved:1. Even though in my case there's a *powered* USB 3.0 hub between the iodd device and the host computer to which it is connected the enclosure *sometimes* reboots itself while the host computer is rebooted, but not always. I couldn't find a pattern why this happens. It's annoying because if you have a long PIN set up then you have to reenter it whenever the enclosure reboots.2. Most of the keys have specific functions assigned to them in addition to the obvious digits (e.g. a short press on 4 is "back" in the menus, while a longer press on 4 is "go to root folder"). While these are very useful it's difficult to remember them all if you're not frequently using the enclosure, which means you have to download and print the relevant pages from the pdf manual, and keep them with the enclosure at all times, as there are no hints whatsoever on the "keyboard" (i.e. front panel). Ideally I'd like some text or icons printed next to each function key. If that's not possible then at least a little laminated card could be included, to be kept on the inside of the cover.3. It dismounts the virtual optical drive whenever you press one of the keys, which I find really annoying as you can't use the menus at all after mounting the virtual optical drive. The same does not happen with the virtual hard drives (they must be explicitly dismounted) which makes me wonder if the same couldn't be implemented for the virtual optical drive, too, via a firmware update.4. Since it emulates up to 4 virtual hard drives I also wonder if a future firmware update could enable more virtual optical drives presented to the host computer at the same time.5. For some unknown reason the emulation doesn't work if the selected image file has more than 24 extents. This means you can't download .iso images from the net straight to the underlying hard drive, as they will probably have many extents, instead you have to download them to another location and then copy or move them to the underlying hard drive. This works well if you have enough free space on that underlying hard drive, otherwise you have to download and use the iodd tool to copy the file without fragmentation, or to defragment it. This tool only runs on Windows, and I'm not particularly keen on running .exe programs to manage an USB device which I expected to be entirely self sufficient.6. There are no details whatsoever about how the encryption is implemented (except for a fuzzy reference that half of the key is stored on the underlying hard drive and the other half in your brain). My relevant education (I studied encryption at length in uni) therefore tells me to put little trust in it - I essentially consider it good enough to prevent only the most casual scenarios, e.g your child or domestic helper going through the files stored on the underlying hard drive. I suspect a motivated hacker would be able to find a way to your (unencrypted) files.I hope I didn't miss anything. Overall I do like the enclosure, it really serves the purpose I bought it for (to avoid maintaining so many bootable USB memory sticks), but it could also be improved a bit. It's something like 4.5 stars in my view but since I can only choose 4 or 5 I chose 4 to signal the product could still be improved. Also, if it could be a little bit cheaper I think it would sell much better. After all it's more expensive than a 512 GB SATA SDD, and you'll need to provide your own underlying 2.5" SATA storage device anyway.Hope this helps.

I thought to myself, "would you actually use this in IT?" The answer, so many yes times! Makes my life as an IT Engineer so much easier it's incredible! Threw a 120gb SSD into and there's more than enough to hold all my ISO's. Can easily spin up a fresh Win2016 server in less than 7 minutes, it's amazingly quick! *Server down and you need to go to site? No problem, you've all the troubleshooting ISO's on hand!Didn't think it would be worth it in the end but it 100% definitely was. I am constantly showing it off to the other Engineers as well :P