Looking for a USB Mass Storage emulator

Question

I'm looking for a USB disk-on-key emulator to use in VMs running Windows XP/Vista.

File transfer is pretty much all I need, but since it's going to be used to showcase another application, it needs to be as standard as possible (emulating real hardware disk-on-keys as closely as possible).

Can you recommend any?

EDIT: We use VMWare here, and the reason we can't use real keys is that our ESX servers are running more VMs than they have real USB ports and sharing is not acceptible.

True, this is not programming specific, but I figure that such emulators are used by us programmers and testers quite frequently. I'll mark this as a community wiki, maybe that'll be more appropriate.

Answer 1

This might be useful http://www.eltima.com/products/usb-over-ethernet/
We use it on our build VM, accessing spare USB ports from another PC

Answer 2

A couple of links from a Google search:

1. The Mass Storage Page
2. Hack n Dev

Answer 3

I'm not sure if this meets your requirements, but you may want to consider VMWare shared folders. I haven't used VMWare ESX servers, so this may not be valid in your case, but at least in VMware workstation, shared folders appear as network drives.

Answer 4

I don't know what you're trying to achieve but couldn't you just create a new virtual disk in VMWare and connect/disconnect it as needed? Unless you need to simulate the actual read/write performance and USB-level characteristics of the USB drive XP is just going to give you another file system you can read and write to like everything else.