If you have played some of the PC games that require the CD/DVD to be present in the optical disk drive during the game play, then you know how painful it becomes at times because of the lagging in the games caused by the slow data read rate of the CD/DVD disk drive. One time tried and tested remedy for this problem is to create an ISO image of the game disk and then use a virtual disk drive to load this ISO image.
While you can use programs like ImgBurn for creating the ISO images from a disk loaded in your optical disk drive, you have to use other software to load the ISO image so that it appears like a CD/DVD in your PC. The virtual disk emulators like ImgDrive can be used for this purpose.
ImgDrive is a freeware CD/DVD/Bluray emulator for Windows computers. After the installation, it places an icon in the notification area of the Windows desktop. You can right-click on this icon and browse an ISO image to load it in Windows Explorer. You can also set the number of virtual disk drives that can be emulated simultaneously. You can add a maximum of seven virtual disk drives.
However, you do not have to use the notification area icon to mount an ISO image in the virtual disk drives. ImgDrive gets integrated in the Windows File Explorer, so you can just double-click on any of the ISO disk images and it will be automatically mounted in the first available virtual disk drive.
ImgDrive is not limited to the standard ISO disk image format. It actually supports many other disk image formats like CUE, NRG, MDS, MDF, ISZ. Unlike some other similar programs, it also supports disk images created in the popular Audio CD formats containing media files of the format APE, FLAC or WAV.
Conclusion: ImgDrive is very unobtrusive CD/DVD/Bluray emulator for Windows. It does not interfere in the regular PC use and supports a maximum of seven virtual disk drives.
You can download ImgDrive from http://www.dvdforge.com/.