Hacker News Reader

Comment by tabiskabis | Hacker News Reader

IODD is a korean manufacturer of special harddrive enclosures. They have an LCD and controls to navigate through the files/folders stored on NTFS/FAT. By selecting an ISO file, the drive announces itself to the computer as a CD/DVD/BD drive containing the ISO. It can also do this to emulate a floppy disk drive, and up to 4 non-/removable USB drives. No need to hope for GRUB magic to maybe work.

Their website and documentation sucks, but the product makes you giggle at the idea of using yumi/rufus/easy2boot/looking for empty/erasable thumbdrives. The latest iteration is the IODD-MINI. Though it looks like the crowdfunding campaign botched, i just bought myself the 512 GB version off Amazon Germany this week.

View on HN

most rooted Android devices can do something like this with the USB Mountr app (available on F-Droid). unfortunately, most kernels only provide mass storage device support, not optical drive, but it's usually good enough.

DroidDrive is another good app, needs root though

any usb gadget should require root, otherwise there are serious security issues. my concern with drivedroid is that it is closed source, which is highly worrisome for a root app.

I've owned two IODD drives, one a "Zalman VE300"-rebadged IODD 2531, and a IODD 2541. Both second hand when I had them.

After a few years of heavy use by me, the 2531's firmware corrupted. Reflashing using arcane prayers, legacy software flashing tool, and a physical Windows XP box got it back up and running. I gave it to a friend who still uses it.

With a 120GB cheap (no DRAM) SATA SSD, these things are fantastic.

I vaguely remember having some hassle initially formatting the drive for the ISOs once, but after that, it's worked flawlessly for so long I can't remember the details.

Despite both working solidly, I really want a Mini just because it would let me slim down my toolkit further.

The enclosures are in my experience, garbage and unreliable.

- They struggle with fragmentation

- sometimes, the UEFI/Bios just won't see the disk, not sure why, I'm guessing the enclosure doesn't boot fast enough?

- Sometimes the enclosure just wouldn't read the ISO list. Again, no idea why. Fragmentation maybe?

I wonder if you could build something like that with the Raspi 4 and it's usb-c OTG support.

I wish every ARM device supported UEFI. Custom images for ever singly ARM device is not sustainable. Only Microsoft required UEFI on ARM devices (and maybe Apple now with their own silicon?) but they locked all those bootloaders. Even when people found ways past those locks, there are no open source drivers for all the hardware on Lumia phones, so they're all useless e-waste bricks now.

DeviceTree can go die in a fire.

Afaik, UEFI (at least on ARM hardware I worked with) embeds the DeviceTree for non-ACPI boot usecases, so the user is no longer responsible for providing the proper DTB for that board, although the user can still override it if needed. Last time I worked with ARMv8, UEFI provided both ACPI tables and the embedded DTB, since ACPI support was undergoing a major rewrite in the kernel at that time.

Yes. I backed a Kickstarter for the pISO that did this with the Pi Zero. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/178023282/piso-the-most...

Open source hardware and software published at https://github.com/ALSchwalm/pISO

Did you actually receive yours? I had a few friends back for one and they never got them :(.

Yes. It's disappointing to hear your friends didn't receive theirs. If they're still interested, there are comments on that Kickstarter organizing an independent production run of the open source design.

Nice! Have you tried the SSD model? Wondering if it would be faster and provide more space (assuming you install a high end SSD).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com