Disk & Image
Mounting Local Drives & Partitions
The Local Drive Mounting feature is designed to completely bypass the need for complex PXE server infrastructure. It allows administrators to attach physical disks, individual partitions, or virtual machine images from a local workstation directly to the target server.
Through hardware-level network encapsulation, the remote motherboard detects these resources instantly as standard, physically connected USB mass storage.
How It Works
The workflow relies on the transparent network encapsulation of storage I/O routing.
- Network Forwarding: Select any local disk or partition on the workstation via the USBridge client application.
- Hardware Emulation: The appliance intercepts and relays block-level read/write commands to the target machine over the physical USB interface.
- OS Transparency: The remote server's operating system and BIOS/UEFI interact with the media exactly as if it were a local, bare-metal flash drive.
Use Cases: The PXE Alternative
This architecture fundamentally accelerates deployment, troubleshooting, and bare-metal recovery scenarios.
- Diskless Bare-Metal Booting: Attach a local partition containing a pre-configured OS and boot a completely diskless remote server instantly.
- Live Diagnostic Environments: Expose heavy forensic or installer environments directly from a laptop without wasting time flashing physical USB media.
- Zero-Infrastructure OS Deployment: Install an operating system on the remote machine using a local disk as the primary distribution repository, eliminating the need for network-boot (PXE) servers.
Performance Characteristics
The current transport architecture utilizes a USB 2.0-compatible Hi-Speed physical path, heavily buffered by onboard memory.
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Transport Protocol | USB 2.0-compatible Hi-Speed |
| Theoretical Throughput | Roughly 35–40 MB/s |
| Internal Network Latency | Approximately 80–150 ms (over LAN) |
| Effective User Experience | Comparable to a high-end HDD or entry-level SATA SSD |
To smooth network latency and accelerate repeated read operations, an internal LPDDR4X RAM cache is integrated between the USB interface and the network transport layer.
A future hardware revision upgrading the transport to USB 3.0/3.1, combined with this caching model, will bring the effective throughput much closer to local NVMe/SSD behavior.
Virtual Machines and Read-Write Overlay
To provide a comprehensive out-of-the-box solution, support extends beyond standard ISOs to include ready-to-use virtual machine environments and non-destructive write modes.
- Native Format Support: Mount VDI, VMDK, and other virtual-disk formats directly from the client application without any mandatory pre-conversion or staging delays.
- Read-Write Overlay Mode (Non-Destructive): When the target server boots and writes data to the mounted image, all write operations are safely redirected and stored in a separate overlay file on the local workstation. The original source image remains completely unmodified, enabling infinite reuse of the baseline environment while retaining individual session results.