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One potentially very useful feature of this Virtual Burner is the ability to emulate DVD-RAM media.  One of the main advantages of DVD-RAM is its ability to function similar to a mass storage device once it is formatted with FAT32, allowing direct read and write access through the drive letter.

While we already tested the ability to write a disc compilation to a DVD-RAM, in the following tests, we will try the following:

• Formatting a virtual DVD-RAM as FAT32 and adding and deleting some files and folders
• Formatting a virtual DVD-RAM as UDF 1.5 and 2.0 file system.
• Writing a formatted virtual DVD-RAM containing data to a physical DVD-RAM disc
• Try creating a virtual DVD-RAM from an existing DVD-RAM which was formatted as FAT32
• Adding and deleting files from this imported FAT32 formatted virtual DVD-RAM if the import was successful

Formatting a DVD-RAM

Before we can start using any DVD-RAM as a disk, it needs to be formatted.  When we create a new virtual blank DVD-RAM medium, Virtual CD displays the following message to say that it needs to be formatted to be used as a rewritable data medium:

We formatted the DVD-RAM in the Windows Explorer just as one would format a removable disk, which completed successfully within a second.  The properties of the formatted DVD-RAM are as follows:

We had no issue writing files to and reading files back using this formatted virtual DVD-RAM. 

Formatting as UDF 1.5 & 2.0

Like a hard disk, DVD-RAM supports a wide range of file systems, with two popular file systems being UDF 1.5 and 2.0 for their speed, at least with physical DVD-RAM drives.  While Windows Vista natively supports the UDF format for reading & writing to DVD-RAM, Windows XP cannot natively format a DVD-RAM with a UDF file system.  So we have an LG format utility that came preinstalled on a Toshiba laptop, which features a Hitachi-LG DVD burner:   

We created a virtual DVD-RAM medium in Virtual CD on the laptop and then tried formatting the virtual DVD-RAM using the DVD-RAM format utility.  The results are as follows:

As the above table shows, it looks like this Virtual Burner is incapable of supporting the LG utility to format a Virtual blank DVD-RAM in the UDF 1.5 or 2.0 file systems.  Each time we tried formatting with a UDF file system, we got the following error:

When the “Execute physical format” option is ticked, it took around 20 seconds to complete the formatting of the FAT32 file system.  With the UDF file systems, it took around 50 seconds with the HDD LED constantly lit before it finally displayed the error message.  Note that according to the Virtual CD manual, the virtual drive does support the UDF file system on DVD-RAM when formatted using Windows Vista’s own disk format utility. 

Writing a Virtual DVD-RAM to a physical DVD-RAM

Now that we can create a virtual DVD-RAM as a rewritable data medium, in this test we will try burning the virtual DVD-RAM to a physical DVD-RAM disc and then check whether we can continue modifying data on the physical DVD-RAM like we did with the virtual DVD-RAM.

We created a Virtual DVD-RAM, placed around 532MB of photographs on the medium, dismounted it and then started the burning of a 1:1 copy to a physical DVD-RAM.  One thing worth noting is that Virtual CD does not warn if there is data on the DVD-RAM before the burn process starts:

One thing we noticed during the write process is that the DVD-RAM drive is not locked.  This means that if the DVD-RAM contains a read/write file system, such as FAT32, it is possible to write data to the disc as the write process is taking place, which will overwrite and thus corrupt the content being written.  To prevent this or even the OS updating what was the former FAT on the disc, we would suggest erasing the DVD-RAM before writing.  To show the issue, we started the write process of the above virtual DVD-RAM image to the DVD-RAM that was formatted and had no problem creating a new folder and copying files into this folder as Virtual CD was still writing to this disc:

Obviously in the above case after the disc was written, the result was a corrupt DVD-RAM.  After we carried out an erase and rewrote the Virtual DVD-RAM to the disc, we are able to read and write using the DVD-RAM just was we were able to with the Virtual DVD-RAM.  The following shows an example of us copying a folder to the disc and creating a new folder to this DVD-RAM we burned:

Creating a Virtual CD from a FAT32 formatted DVD-RAM

In this test, we will create a virtual CD from a DVD-RAM, which has been formatted using the FAT32 file system.  If successful, we will then check whether we can still add and remove data form the virtual DVD-RAM when it is mounted. 

Once we formatted a DVD-RAM in the FAT32 file system, we placed about 532MB of photos on the disc as we done earlier with the virtual DVD-RAM.  We then ran the operation to create a virtual CD from the disc:

The following shows the creation process.  For the FAT32 formatted disc, it reports the disc type as “Unknown CD type”:

The creation process completed successfully and we were able to browse and open files on the Virtual disc as with the original DVD-RAM disc:

To test whether this Virtual disc still has the ability to deleted, modify and add files like the original disc, we deleted the folder “Spoga photos”, add a folder “Cologne ‘06” containing 2.22GB of photos and video, moved 679 photos from one folder to another within the new “Cologne ‘06” folder and renamed “Dennis Book Launch” to “Dennis Book Launch ‘04”.  We then dismounted the virtual disc and remounted it again to ensure the updates have actually been carried when the disc has been mounted again:

The balloon in the screenshot confirms that the “Cologne ‘06” directory we copied over matches the size of the source.

Creating a Virtual CD from a UDF 2.0 formatted DVD-RAM

Earlier in the review, we tried formatting a virtual blank DVD-RAM with the UDF file system, but were unable to carry out this process using the LG DVD-RAM format utility.  This time, we used the utility to format a physical DVD-RAM disc using the UDF 2.0 file system and prepared it with the same files as we used for the FAT32 test.  We then created a virtual CD from our DVD-RAM:

The creation process completed successfully and we were able to browse and open files on the Virtual disc, like with the virtual CD we created from the FAT32 formatted disc earlier.  As shown in the left column, the disc format is still indeed the UDF 2.0 file system:

To test whether this Virtual disc still has the ability to deleted, modify and add files like we were able to do with the FAT32 formatted virtual DVD-RAM we created earlier, we carried out the same set of tasks:

As the above screenshot shows, we had no issue modifying the content of the UDF formatted virtual DVD-RAM we created from the physical disc. 

The Virtual Burner

Performance & Write tests