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.

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.

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.

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.

Latest Update: Sadly still seeing lots of problems when using encryption. I copy ISOs to the mounted, encrypted HDD and every single time one of the 10 or so ISOs becomes corrupted during the transfer. And when one is corrupted the ST400 says "No supported partition" and I need to reformat the HDD and start over. I also had an issue with one ISO in particular, one that had a longer than usual file name inside the ISO, which would instantly cause the No supported partition issue. If I don't use encryption then these problems don't occur. Hopefully IODD will investigate and resolve. Previous Update: IODD investigated tested the issue I described to them with several ISOs (when using encryption on the ST400), they found an issue where the OS was resetting the USB connection, and IODD released a beta firmware update (7.6.0) that seems to have fixed my issue. I'm very happy with the fix, with the customer service person helping, with the dev team. Thanks IODD! I really wanted this device to work, and delighted it now does. Previous Update: IODD support responded to say that my problems may be because of low power, that I should try connecting through a powered USB hub. I tried a powered USB hub but that did not resolve the issue. Original review: When I saw this I just had to get it. It scratches me exactly where I itch. I love the idea of this. I'm always in search of a USB stick to install with an ISO, and always need to make the decision, do I over-write this? What if I need it? So being able to solve that perpetual problem with a device that can hold them all AND supports encryption AND can even do stuff with VHDs AND more? They could have charged 4x as much and I'd have bought it. But, alas, after 12 hours or so trying to get this thing to work, I give up. There's something seriously wrong somewhere. 1) The manuals/guides/wiki are minimally helpful. They lack specificity on some really basic things and then they muddy things up further by lacking fluent English. For example, when I unboxed this I had no idea what to do next. I thought I'd throw my SSD into it and I'd get a dialog that said something like, "I see you've inserted a new drive, want us to prepare it for you?" Nope. Then I thought surely there'd be a menu option to do that. Nope. No instructions in the manual telling me to format before I insert the drive in the device, or to insert the drive then connect it to a computer and format it there. The device is telling me it doesn't like the partition that's already on the device, so I remove the drive and format it outside of the device. They are pretty vague sort of indicating that it can be any Windows style and format. But they say, it can't be the first partition, so it sounds like they may be expecting GPT. So I try GPT and NTFS (since someone somewhere said it must be NTFS to do VHDs). I do all that, insert the drive in the device, turn on encryption, and... it wipes the partition I just set up. So now I figure out I can plug the ST400 in and format the exposed drive from the computer. Okay! Now I'm getting somewhere?! 2) Buggy, defective, or they are letting me do something massively wrong. I copy over a few ISOs, safely unmount, then plug it up to an old laptop and try to use Kali live. Everything's starting up, I'm giddy with anticipation, and... I'm at some initramfs prompt. Something went wrong. Odd. I try an Ubuntu live. And, I'm at an error screen. I go back to my other computer, check the hashes on the ISOs, they are perfect copies. WTF? I try again on the laptop. Same result. I look for any settings on the IODD, maybe there's some sort of compatibility mode, maybe it's trying to emulate a 96x CDROM and it's freaking out the installer or something weird. Nope, very few options to choose from. I google for similar errors, nothing relevant. I search for anything IODD, and there's so little IODD related discussion and no community from which to get help. I copy over a few other ISOs, maybe it's an Ubuntu issue since Kali is also based on Ubuntu IIRC. Nope, same result. 3) I'd try every combination of things I could think of, switching cables, switching MBR to GPT and back, using or not using encryption, NTFS or exFAT, etc. and I only ever got it to be workable once, and that was with GPT/NTFS/no encryption but I don't even know if that working status would last. Quite a few times I've set up the device on one computer, disconnected it to add some ISOs from another computer and when I get to the other computer suddenly the drive is no longer recognized as though the partitions are damaged, and I take it back to the original computer and it's still not recognized, despite the display on the device still listing the ISOs. (This is with me doing the safe removal in Windows and then also the Safe Removal on the device itself.) I've had issues where I unmount the virtual cd drive and hit that button again and get some CHKDSK 30 display on the device (nothing in manual) and then suddenly it can't list the contents of the device until I restart. I had another issue where I was trying to copy ISOs to the device and got a Windows error about something else modifying the volume or something. And I've twice had issues where I set the password, it worked on one computer, I go to another computer and the password is rejected -- I know it sounds like operator error, and still could be but I swear to you after the first time I was super, super, super careful in setting and repeatedly entering the code. I've spent hours trying every combination of things I can think of, hoping to find the magical right combination that lets me use this device, but I've only seen it truly work once, and have zero confidence it in working again or continuing to work if it ever does. And again, maybe it's all, somehow me. But there's no community online, I've heard support isn't responsive [I WAS VERY WRONG HERE! IODD IS VERY RESPONSIVE!], and if I am doing something massively wrong then, fair enough, that's on me, but it's also on this device somewhat for not making it clear what I'm supposed to do and letting me know when I do something so seriously wrong.

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

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.

Almost any pro IT guy - and most vaguely geeky hobbyists - who's had a chance to play with one of my IODD drives, ends up buying one :D They're all good - the older 2.5" ones became a staple of my toolkit, previously resold in EU under Zalman branding, and they've just got better since - going from USB 2 to USB 3, adding a full keypad and screen for better UI, more compact options (the IODD mini) and then this, bringing the newer interface to 2.5", along with - praise be! - a USB C port! The build quality is pretty nice too, a step up from before - I really like the clicky button feel on the keypad and it feels nice and solid in general. This is now my primary workshop IODD with an IODD mini in the go-bag :) Yes, you can use Ventoy. But this is like ventoy in hardware :) It works - nearly everywhere, nearly every time. It identifies as the emulated device down to the BIOS level, works with fussy servers, and makes it pretty much impossible to pick the wrong drive or accidentally overwrite your USB key during an install. I use a range of USB thumb drive images for various purposes - some copied from actual keys I had floating around or loaned. And USB HDD images to keep a Windows2Go install handy at all times (and a Debian install as well!). And of course, a full library of ISOs, from proliant service packs to windows 10/11/server to truenas to proxmox to pfsense to firmware update discs for SSDs and diagnostic toolkit discs. Get one :) And this particular one is a good choice, if you don't need it to be tiny - check the IODD mini for that! Give it a nice big SSD and load it all up!