With a masterful nail in the optical disc coffin, Rajeev Nagar of the Windows 8 Storage & File Systems team has detailed how Microsoft’s new operating system will natively mount ISO disc images. On the slightly more enterprisesque side of the equation, Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files will also be supported by Windows 8 in much the same way as ISOs. Both new features will be smoothly integrated into Windows 8 Explorer’s ribbon menu, and mounting an ISO or VHD is as simple as double clicking the file.

If you’ve ever had to play with disc images of any kind, you’ll appreciate just how awesome native ISO and VHD support will be. If, like the hairy denizens of the ExtremeTech bunker, you absolutely abhor the banality of physically locating and slotting discs into your computer, this change will revolutionize how you use Windows. You can make backups of your games and movies, store the files on your hard disk, and then just double click the file when you want to play them. Mounting ISOs will appear in My Computer as optical drives, and unmounting them is as simple as clicking Eject in the ribbon.

If you already have a huge archive of backed up photos and family videos, you can now put them back onto your computer — and if you want a bit of redundancy (and rightly so), just keep a mirror of your important ISOs on a network-attached storage device.

The most important facet of this change in Windows 8, however, is the antiquation of the optical drive. As we already know, Windows 8 will run on x86 and ARM devices alike, including iPad-like tablets — and tablets don’t have optical drives. Instead of admitting defeat and opting for the file systemless iOS approach, though, Windows 8 tablet users can simply copy ISOs to their device via USB, and then open them with a greasy prod of the finger. As you can see in the image at the top, Microsoft is implicitly suggesting that even Office will be made available as an ISO.

The likely result — in a year or two when Windows 8 is installed on a significant number of computers — is that software will shift away from optical discs and be provided exclusively in ISO format, probably on a USB thumb drive; and every kind of computer, PC or tablet, can read a USB drive.

With regard to VHDs, the repercussions for normal, mom-and-pop users aren’t all that significant — but it’s a tasty olive branch for power users. Many backup programs store files as VHDs, and almost every virtualization tool can read and write VHDs. Now, if you want to interrogate the contents of a random VHD, just double click it — the VHD will appear as a normal drive in My Computer — and then just Eject it when you’re done.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Windows 8 only goes half way to natively supporting ISO and VHD: It can read the files, but it cannot create them — but perhaps that would be asking just a little too much, at least until Windows 9. There are free and easy tools like ISO Recorder that make short work of ISO manufacturing, but that isn’t quite the same as having a pretty button on the Windows 8 Explorer ribbon menu. It’s not like Windows 8 will be the first to the table with native ISO mounting support, either: both Linux and Mac OS X have supported it via the command line since time in memoriam — but it will certainly be more visible in Windows 8.

Read more at Building Windows 8 or download the demo video (below) in MP4