Speeding up hard drives?

[J. D.]

Explorer doesn't see the drive when I plug it in. It doesn't have a drive
letter and it isn't associated with a folder. Both of these are still true
while the backup program is running.

I did this is by choice, in Disk management...

In fact, I have backed up successfully to unmounted drives using two
different backup programs, Macrium Reflect and Casper.

"Mounting" is just a name for assigning a read address to a device so
if your backup application ca see a drive it could mount it for the
duration of the backup and then dismount it, or if the drive is
accessed through an address that is part of the application's code,
when the application quits the drive would automatically be un
mounted.

That is very much what my backup scripts do. They are launched and
simply check the existence of a named backup partition, if it is
available they mount it, do the backup and then de mount the partition
and then die, task accomplished.

It is probably easier to do in a Unix/Linux script because of the
availability of software tools but it would be almost as easy to do in
"C" or any other language that gives you access to the basic hardware.
No reason that any operating system couldn't do it; and apparently
they have

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb
(jdslocombatgmail)