DAEMON Tools Lite Editor's Review

Speed up your optical disk drive access with today's cool utility.

Optical drives take a great deal of space in a portable computer. In many cases, they not only take up a lot of space, but compared to other spinning media, the access can be slow. Thankfully, there's Daemon Tools Lite to help remedy this issue.

With storage media as cheap as it is having a utility to emulate a CD/DVD ROM drive can make a lot of sense.  With Daemon Tools, you do two very important tasks – emulate a CD/DVD ROM drive and create a disk image. Daemon tools will let you create disc image files in DAEMON Tools native format — Media Data eXtended (*.mdx). MDX format is designed to make it easier to store disc images. It's more convenient to have one MDX image instead of two MDS and MDF files.

Daemon Tools Lite also enables you to emulate up to 4 CD/DVD virtual drives on your PC. Virtual drives will appear in your OS just like real ones. Select a virtual drive then choose a disc image you want to mount. Disk images are mounted by virtual in My Computer. Virtual drives can create and read ISO, MDS/MDF and MDX image files from original discs inserted in physical CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray drives. You could also use images created with other programs. DAEMON Tools products work with variety of image types.

Pros: Speeds up drive access, works with CD's, DVD's and Blue Ray discs.

Cons: Pro version is expensive.

Conclusion: If you have the hard drive space and don't want or need to carry an optical drive, a virtual drive is a great alternative. Daemon Tools Lite is a great application to enable this functionality.

version reviewed: 4.40.2