Virtual Drives have become quite popular over the last few years. It allows you to keep you expensive CD/DVD in a locker to prevent damage and still use it by making a image and mounting it . They also run faster than our normal drives. So this thing has made it quite popular among the PC users who love to play games. They also serve as no-cd patches which are sometimes questionable when it comes to legal issues.

Its working is not so difficult. First you need a image of the CD/DVD saved to your hard drive. Then you need to create a virtual drive using any of the software available out there and mount the image into it. CD/DVD images can take a lot of space on your hard drive but it is a little thing compared to what you can lose if you damage your original CD/DVD which costs a hell lot of Money.

Lot of softwares are available which can be used to make a virtual drive but Alcohol 120% and Daemon tools are the ones quite popular . I have used both of them and they both are quite similar except some minor things. Both can be used to create Virtual Drives, mount, unmount image and emulate the copy protections: Safedisc, SecuROM, Laserlock, and RMPS. But feature wise Alcohol 120% is superior as it offers several other features such as: Creating images of cd/dvd, backing up of CD/DVD, erasing rewritable discs and the no of virtual drives it can create is 31 compared to 4 that can be created with Daemon tools.

Now Talking about interface, both are easy to understand and follow. Daemon tools runs from the system tray icon while Alcohol 120% has a window type interface to manage your images and virtual drives. Each of them are simple in there own way.

Alcohol 120% does offer many other functions than Daemon but the features come at price and on the other hand Daemon Tools is a freeware. My advice to you would be to use Daemon tools as it is simple and most important ‘free’ , if you don’t like it you can always try Alcohol 120% trial version .