I am a bit confused and hopefully someone can set me straight. I am looking for a tool (thought it was NetDrive) that will allow me to use a remote drive (NFS, CIFS normally mounted) and fool the operating system into thinking that it is a real, block-level, local drive. In other words it appears as something like a USB connected external drive. I tried using the FTP option but it will not look like a REAL local drive. Can NetDrive do this or is there another tool available for windows that will?
Hello,
Thank you for your question.
NetDrive uses WinFsp (a FUSE-based file system) on Windows, which allows remote storage to be mounted as a regular drive in Explorer.
However, this method works at the file-system level, not at the block-device level.
This means NetDrive cannot make a remote drive appear to the operating system as a real local disk, such as a USB-attached hard drive.
Specifically, NetDrive:
- Does not appear as a physical disk in Windows Disk Management
- Cannot be formatted with NTFS/FAT
- Operates using file-level access, not block-level storage
The functionality you are looking for—where the OS treats remote storage as a true local block device—is typically only possible with block storage technologies such as iSCSI.
Therefore, NetDrive does not support creating a block-level local drive from remote storage.
If you have any further questions, we would be happy to assist.
Thank you.
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