EMULATING HARDWARE HAVING SELECTED STORAGE CHARACTERISTICS

Hardware having selected storage characteristics is emulated within a computer configuration by, (a) representing to an operating system of the computer configuration the presence of the hardware having the selected storage characteristics and addresses for reading data therefrom and writing data thereto, (b) writing data to an address of the hardware by (i) writing the data to an address of a data store with which the hardware address is associated, or (ii) writing the data to an address of the data store with which no hardware address is associated, and associating the hardware address with that data store address, and (c) reading data from a hardware address by (i) reading the data from a data store address with which the hardware address has been associated in the writing step, or (ii) returning data that has not been written to the hardware in the writing step.