When it comes to drive emulation, DAEMON Tools is pretty much the standard. It's free for personal use, easy to use, light on resources and does exactly what it says on the tin.
Emulating a virtual drive may not seem that useful at first sight, but if you think about it, it has many advantages: you can load any image file directly on your system, you save the time and effort of CD burning and plus, virtual drives are much faster than actual CD units.
After installation – and the necessary system reboot – DAEMON Tools shows up as an unobtrusive icon in the system tray from which you can access the program's main tools and the configuration menu. All you have to do is browse to where your image file is stored and 'mount' it as a virtual drive using DAEMON Tools.
The Lite version of DAEMON Tools only lets you emulate up to four virtual drives but doesn't have the extra features of the Pro and Advanced editions, such as support for DVD HD and Blu-Ray drivers, or the ability to create image files. However this version of DAEMON Tools is just perfect for the average home user, who will hardly need to emulate more than a couple drives simultaneously.
DAEMON Tools supports a wide variety of formats and is a really useful app for accessing your CD collection without having to carry them around, protecting them from scratches in the process.
With DAEMON Tools you can easily emulate up to four virtual drives on your system, and mount a wide range of image files on them.
