To all the people doubting the use of such a device, many OSs don't currently work "out of the box" with unetbootn and other such tools.
I've personally had problems with RHEL and Windows XP, and I can guarantee there are others.
With RHEL, you had to copy the rpm repo on the CD to another storage medium and manually set up the repo. This is because the default repo is set up to detect an optical drive, mount it, and use it as a repo. That's a pain.
Windows XP has problems with continuity between the restarts involved in the install process.
Emulating an optical drive would fix those problems and allow any ISO to run unmodified.
A final benefit is the multi-ISO support on one drive.
A much more common problem is that the hardware/bios/low-level bootloader is capable of booting from a USB CD drive, but not from a USB mass storage device.
"If you boot the iso from a harddrive (or the equivalent, a 'normal' usb stick) the installer fails because it explicitly looks for a CD/optical medium containing the repository"
With the gadget in this article that wouldn't be an issue anymore: The thumbdrive _is_ an optical drive for all the OS knows.
I've personally had problems with RHEL and Windows XP, and I can guarantee there are others.
With RHEL, you had to copy the rpm repo on the CD to another storage medium and manually set up the repo. This is because the default repo is set up to detect an optical drive, mount it, and use it as a repo. That's a pain.
Windows XP has problems with continuity between the restarts involved in the install process.
Emulating an optical drive would fix those problems and allow any ISO to run unmodified.
A final benefit is the multi-ISO support on one drive.