Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:

Windows 10 lets one mount a CD or DVD ISO image as a drive. Once that
is done access to data on the CD is very fast. Before Win 10 I used
DAEMON Tools to mount a CD for faster access. My question is, do both
methods actually put the data in computer RAM? Or is it temporarily
loaded onto a hard drive? If the latter, is it on the system disk
(C? If it's on the system disk, since mine is a SSD, am I severely
"using up" the life of the SSD?

Just as with the mass storage subsystem, optical storage, or USB media,
the file system in that media gets used to access the files that the
file system manages. Without a file system on the media, you won't be
accessing any files. The file system gets mounted and then accessed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing)

A CD is 750MB (700 MiB). A DVD is 4.7GB single layer, 9.4GB dual-sided
single layer, 17GB double-sided double-layer. A BD disc holds 25GB
single layer and 50GB dual layer. Would you want that much system
memory sucked up just to access a file? It is unlikely you have as much
system RAM as the capacity of a BD. If the optical media's contents had
to get copied to a hard disk to access the files, would you really wait
for the copy operation to complete? What if you used an SSD instead of
a HDD. Would you want the optical disc's contents eating up space on
your expensive SSD?