Since ever I heard of a multi-CD drive (you know, the drives which can take in multiple CDs), it always puzzled me why they exposed themselves to the system as multiple individual drives (e.g, E,F,G) instead of just one drive letter that can swap its contents.

What software scenarios would have benefited from the multi drive letters? Especially that the drive is only able to read from one disc at a time, so you can't -say- read a file from E: then another from F: then a third from E: again without having the drive actually change discs internally.

I always thought such drives were an answer to multi-disc CD games (e.g. Phantasmagoria, Wing Commamder).. but all such games require swapping the disc under the same drive letter, so basically those multi-CD drives are totally useless.

I wonder if they ever had an option to expose themselves as one drive letter to DOS/Windows?