Proper terminology for this?

S

Sly

Supreme [H]ardness
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Aug 17, 2004
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What do you call it when a single device acts as two? And how do you refer to each one?

I have a WD Passport and it's actually read as two devices. The first one is a CD Drive, and the second one is an NTFS harddrive. I've just been referring to them as 'Partitions' 1st partition is the DVD drive, and second partition is the harddrive.

Same goes for Media Players where the 1st 'Partition' is the internal storage and the 2nd one is the microSD slot.

I tend to explain things in layman a lot but i make sure to use the proper terminologies. I've had to use 'Partition' twice now for lack of a better term, and i'd like to know what the proper one is before i do any more.

Partition just seems the right one because the 1st 'Partition' always takes the first drive letter and the 2nd one takes the next, but i know that can't be right since this is a USB device, not a harddrive.
 
I have a WD Passport and it's actually read as two devices. The first one is a CD Drive, and the second one is an NTFS harddrive.
Click to expand...
I've never had a passport.

Are there real partitions on the drive or is it "read" as two different devices in the device/ hard drive manager?

Screenshot?
 
There's only one partition on the NTFS and it's 'read' as two devices.

There's not much to screenshot. If you plug it in, you get a new CD drive and a new harddrive in My Computer. The emulated CD drive contains the autorun and installer for the WD Passport backup suite.

The explanations i'm referring to is it not being recognized in non-windows devices, and the problem is that the first partition (there i go again) being a CD drive (which is unsupported) and the scan stopping there instead of continuing to check the second partition which is the actual harddrive. Solution was to use the Passport utility to turn off the first partition so there's only the harddrive visible to any device that you plug into.
 
Maybe call them virtual drives? I don't know what the "proper" terminology is, though. But it seems to fit the description. One physical device that presents many virtual interfaces to the user.
 
I "See" says the blind Old Hippie.

I don't know what I'd call it other than what you did..... "emulated" this or that seems to be the key word.
 
It's most likely a small flash drive built into the hardware with drivers and whatnot - the U3 flash drives had these and I've seen them built into WWAN cards.

You could use "partition" in the general sense of the word, meaning a division, but it's not a partition on a hard drive as you'd commonly encounter with PCs. Calling it a "partition" is likely to lead to confusion with an actual HDD partition. The technical definition is probably that it's an emulated CD running from flash storage embedded in the external drive device. As I've done a bit of working with weird flash drive formats (trying to get a rewritable flash drive to look like a regular Windows install CD), these USB devices with virtual CDs included seem to require special hardware (i.e. a different chip) for the PC to see it as a CD drive rather than just a flash drive with a non-standard storage volume.
 
Yeah, it's just a second partition with built-in software to make it read-only. Just use your OS to delete both partitions, then make a new one the size of the drive and format it with NTFS or the format of your liking, then you'll be good to go. :)
 
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