Alcohol 120%: 240 Proof Proves Intoxicating Breaking the CD/DVD Drive Bottleneck Scott Koegler
Do you ever worry that your precious game disks will get scratched, or even worse, lost? And even with all that RAM and a multi-Gig CPU, why do you still have to continually wait for your DVD drive to deliver data? A speedy alternative to the CD/DVD drive bottleneck, Alcohol Software's Alcohol 120% might make your head spin once you get used to moving your CDs and DVDs to your hard drive.
Why Bother?
The myth is that CD and DVD media are indestructible, but you've probably already discovered the fallacy in that one. Surface scratches are all too often the downfall of DVDs and CDs, and while they won't completely ruin the disk in most cases, they can make some tracks unreadable. This might be acceptable when you're listening to music, where you can often just skip over a song or two, but for programs, data, or games, missing a little data is simply not an option.
Enter Alcohol 120%. Alcohol lets you copy your digital media disks to hard drive, then file the originals away for safekeeping. Aside from the obvious benefit of protecting your original copy, you'll find some nice surprises when you start to use your disk-based copies.
20x or 200x?
Speedy DVD drives can read data at around 20x normal play speed, or about 3,600 KB/sec, and those speeds are increasing all the time. If you're lucky enough to have a late model drive, you're already enjoying these speeds from your drive. Because it takes advantage of the much faster inherent speeds of a hard disk, Alcohol 120%, however, goes far beyond a DVD drive's speeds. Once your programs are copied to your hard drive, they can be run at the same speed any other application runs.
Multiple Drives
I have two CD/DVD drives connected to my Dell 170-L. That means I can load two different DVD-based programs at one time and switch between them, or even run both at the same time. But when I want to access a third disk or run a third program at the same time, I have to decide which disk to swap out. This is not only inconvenient, but the stack of disks on my shelf is getting tough to manage. I can only imagine the disk-swapping frustration one drive would create.
Alcohol 120% let me copy my most used titles to my hard drive and run them all at the same time if I need. In fact, the program allows up to 31 virtual drives. That's a lot of programs ... or better yet, a lot of games that I can load up without shuffling disks. The only real limitation, of course, is the free space available on your hard drive, which DVDs can certainly chew up quite quickly.
Sharing
Some applications need to be shared among several users on a network. If every computer has a DVD drive, sharing the disk is a matter of finding who had it last and if they happen to be using the program at the moment. With Alcohol 120% you can locate your virtual DVDs on a shared network drive. Once the disks are copied there, any PC on the network with rights to the drive can access them through their copy of Alcohol 120%.
