Virtual drives - What are they?

Virtual drive
A virtual drive is a term used with respect to computers when a drive is emulated in some fashion. The drive being emulated could be a hard drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD or a network share among others.

A virtual hard drive can be created from RAM for fast read/write access.

Virtual DVDs are often mounted as disk images via disk image emulator software. This allows the content of a CD or DVD to be read from the disk image on a hard drive, rather than a disc drive. This may also allow users to run software that requires a CD or a DVD, without the need of having a registered copy in the disc drive.


Virtual Hard Disk
Virtual hard disks are most commonly used in on the fly disk encryption ("OTFE") software such as FreeOTFE and BestCrypt, where an encrypted "image" of a disk is stored on the PC. When you enter the disk's password, the disk image is "mounted", and made available as a new drive letter on your PC. Files written to this virtual drive are written to the encrypted image, and never stored in cleartext.

The process of making such an encrypted disk available for use is called "mounting", the process of removing it is called "dismounting"

Other virtual hard disks include:
Network shares mounted as local drives
FTP and SFTP can be also mapped as a virtual drive with a software called 'netdrive' or 'sftpdrive'.
VMware emulated PCs use unencrypted disk images which may be mounted on a PC outside VMware as an emulated disk
webdav - which does not exactly act like a physical disk.

Virtual Burner
A virtual CD burner is a device driver that emulates a CD/DVD Burner. It appears as another drive in the system with writing capabilities. When information is written to the drive, it creates an ISO Image representation of the CD that would, under normal circumstances, be physically created. ISO images can be compressed into CSO images.

This allows you to use any CD burning software to create what can be later mounted as a virtual drive.