Drive Media

On This Page

• Overview
• Medium Name
• Types of Drive Media

Overview

The drive medium is an ordinary physical storage medium. Firestreamer accesses drive media in raw mode without any file system involved; tape data blocks directly correspond to data sectors of the medium.

When used for the first time, a drive medium is assigned a unique bar code. For convenience reasons, you should attach a label with the bar code to the medium. IMPORTANT: If you load blank drive media into a tape library, and the media is not intended for immediate use, we recommend that you mark the media as free in your backup software. This operation causes tape labels to be written to the media, which in turn also permanently associates the newly created temporary bar codes with the media. If it is not done and the computer is restarted, the blank drive media will receive new temporary bar codes, and your backup software may fail if it has not inventoried the tape library and is still expecting the bar codes that were in effect before the restart.

In most cases, Firestreamer does not need any software, including device drivers, that may come with your media drives. Because such software may sometimes cause adverse effects, we recommend that you do not install it unless needed.

Medium Name

• The drive letter (for example, D:). Depending on your particular hardware, different media drives may or may not be assigned the same drive letter when connected one at a time.
• The interface name (for example, \??\IDE#CdRomNEC-IDE-CDR00#{53f56308-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}). The interface name is independent of the medium's content. For example, different hard disk drives connected one at a time to the same USB external enclosure will have the same interface name.
• The volume name (for example, \??\Volume{72290c9b-fbef-11dd-8509-000c29b73bf1}). The volume name is associated with the medium's partition and will change if the medium is reformatted. For example, different hard disk drives connected one at a time to the same USB external enclosure will have different volume names.
• The non-persistent device name (for example, \Device\CdRom0). Note that a non-persistent device name may change when the computer is restarted.

You can view the drive letter, interface name and volume name of a drive medium in the Add Drive Media form.

Types of Drive Media

Firestreamer supports drive media of the following types:

• Direct-access media (HDD, RDX, flash memory)
• Optical media (BD, HD DVD and DVD)
• Iomega REV