IODD ST400 Variations (NO SSD)

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.

I used to have to carry around a dozen different flash drives for work. Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server, various versions of Red Hat and Ubuntu, special drives for Microsoft Surface devices (which can't be reimaged using a standard Windows disk), drives for software, drives for backups, etc.This device lets me repurpose a 2 TB SSD from an older computer and combine all those various drives into a single unit. As big as this thing is, it's still smaller than the case I carried all the other disks around in. I also especially like that I can boot directly to an ISO without needing to create a physical disk.My only complaints are that the instructions are pretty bad, though at least it's not that hard to figure out, and setting up a virtual hard drive is a bit tricky and requires a download that is hard to find. IODD's website is rather a mess.The description is not 100% clear: you can have up to 4 virtual drives or 1 ISO and 3 VHDs ACTIVE at the same time, but you can have as many ISO and VHD files on the SSD as you can fit. If you already have 4 open and need another one, you'll need to deactivate one first.Here's a tip: You can't create a VHD without the special software, so I made a small VHD, activated it on the IODD, then copied the tools onto this drive. It doesn't take up much space, less than 10 MB if you include the manual, and if I ever need to create another VHD I've already got the software right there.

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.

It's very amazing item with quality and helpful tools for any IT persons