What a virtual drive is for, now that the real one has gone

Physical optical drives keep disappearing from computers, but disc images have not left with them. Old games, teaching material, rescue discs and driver collections sit on hard disks as ISO files or some other image format, and using that content without plugging in an external drive means giving the system something that behaves like a disc. That is what Alcohol 52% does: it presents an image file to the operating system as a drive letter, and from then on the software being installed, played or read has no idea that no disc is spinning anywhere.

Six drives, read at two hundred times the speed

The tool comes from a team that has worked on disc utilities for years, and this is the slimmer member of the family, the one without burning. The free edition mounts up to 6 CD or DVD drives at the same time; anyone who needs more can move to the paid edition, which reaches 31. Read speed goes up to 200 times, so the wait when a large image is loaded is far shorter than with a physical drive spinning up.

Almost every image format is accepted

Format coverage is where it earns its keep: ISO, MDS, CCD, BIN, CUE and CDI all load directly. On the CD side it covers audio discs, video discs, photo discs, mixed mode and multi session layouts; on the DVD side, data, video and audio discs. At the hardware level it speaks to ATAPI and SCSI devices and also accepts external drives on the IEEE-1394 and USB buses. Around the mounting itself sit the supporting jobs: an image can be made from a physical disc in the drive, the disk can be scanned to collect the images already lying around into one list, the number of virtual drives can be raised or lowered as needed, and the interface arrives in 25 languages with simplified Chinese among them.

From players to archivists

Different people find different uses. Someone replaying an old game turns the disc into an image once and mounts it whenever the mood takes them, which removes the search through a shelf of cases. Technicians who reinstall systems carry rescue discs and driver collections as images on a pocket drive and call them up on whatever machine is in front of them. Households with a stack of photo discs or teaching CDs can copy them to images and read those instead, which spares the original discs the wear. Images live on a hard disk or a portable drive, survive longer than the discs they came from, and are far quicker to find.

Small, steady, quick to learn

The installer is a little over 10 MB, and the program is usable as soon as it finishes. The interface keeps the conventional window layout: drag an image into the list, press mount, and the drive appears. It supports both the 32 bit and the 64 bit builds of Windows from 7 to Windows 11, and treats old hardware kindly as well. Having been around for many years, it has lived through the whole run of system changes from the XP era to the present, and the low level driver has been adapted to each new release, so an existing user who upgrades the system has no reason to look for a replacement. Two cautions belong here: it cannot be installed alongside the fuller paid member of the same family, so one of the two has to be chosen, and because a virtual drive loads a device driver at a low level, any other tool of the same kind should be removed cleanly first to avoid a driver conflict.

What the free edition leaves out, and who it suits

Very little of the core has been cut. Mounting, loading and making images, the operations anyone actually repeats, are all present, and personal use of them has no time limit. The paid edition relaxes limits such as the number of virtual drives, and a household is unlikely to need that many. The language question settles itself too: choosing simplified Chinese during setup is enough to work without friction. For anyone with a pile of disc images, or an occasional need to read an old disc on a computer that no longer has a drive, this is a small tool worth keeping installed.

Alcohol 52% does the unglamorous job well: it turns an image file into a drive letter, six of them at once, at up to 200 times the speed of the disc it came from. The free edition keeps the mounting, the image making and the format coverage, and only the drive count waits behind the paid one.