Burn multiple dvds at once

[Pizzarro]

I'm wanting to buy 2-4 dvd burners so that I can do multiple burns at once from my computer. I know nero supports burning to multiple drives, but I can't figure out how it would work. A single 16x dvd is ~22MB/sec whereas most hard drives top out at ~10MB/sec. By that calculation, a hard drive couldn't burn 1 dvd at full speed, let alone 3.
I've been looking into dvd duplication towers and have seen controllers that will burn up to 7 dvds at 16x from a single ide hard drive. The controller has 64MB of ram, but even paired with the cache from the hard drive and burners it still doesn't make sense.
I've looked inside a 16-bay cd tower and it basically looks like a 4 port controller that's branched off to 3 other groups of 4 ports.
There has to be a way to do this. I was thinking about 2 sata hard drives in raid 0, but I still can't see that being enough throughput. It shouldn't be necessary given the duplication towers are doing it with much less effort.
JJ

 

[pat]

My HDD can throw out 110 MB/s (RAID0) or 60 MB/s as single drive. I don't know where you got your numbers, but they are all wrong. I often burned 2 DVD at one time without any problem. Just get a clean and stable system. I use an AMD 3000+ with a motherboard with nvidia chipset and my RAID and all other drive on the nvidia IDE controller.

By the way, an external 16x DVD at full speed is at the limit of the faster USB 2.0 controller. My USB2.0 external hdd max out at 24-26 MB/s .. while on an IDE controller, the same HDD goes out at more than 50 MB/s...

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[dinkster9]

ditto to what pat said. I have two nec dvd burners on individual ide channels and two hard drives on raid 0 (using a pci raid card). This leaves each burner direct access and not sharing an ide channel. As long as your hard drive is not close to full and not badly fragmented, it should be able to send out info fairly fast. You could reach the problem that while burning two different dvd's, located on different sections of your hard drive, that they would be unable to keep up at 16x. I use nero and have it cache all files before burning (this causes more startup time, but then all files are nice and in order for the burn = less hard drive seeking).

My raid 0 2x160gig drives = about 300 usable gigs can burn two dvds as long as its under 60% or so full. When it gets down to only about 20% space left, it seems to not be able to transfer enough info to both drives at the same time.

 

[crobertson]

In Nero have you have to do is select the multiple burner box, then when it shows you the available drives, click on both/all of them. They burn away. Burning 2 takes me the same time as burning 1.
Anything over that, get an external duplicator. (So you can make multiple pirated moves for all your friends) You get 2 benefits there. It will burn from your computer or duplicate from a single DVD and you can keep your computer free. From what I understand is burning 6-7 takes the same time as burning 1, plus when you duplicates it takes even less time and you can make better duplicates.

 

[pariwartan2004]

I'm wanting to buy 2-4 dvd burners so that I can do multiple burns at once from my computer. I know nero supports burning to multiple drives, but I can't figure out how it would work. A single 16x dvd is ~22MB/sec whereas most hard drives top out at ~10MB/sec. By that calculation, a hard drive couldn't burn 1 dvd at full speed, let alone 3.
I've been looking into dvd duplication towers and have seen controllers that will burn up to 7 dvds at 16x from a single ide hard drive. The controller has 64MB of ram, but even paired with the cache from the hard drive and burners it still doesn't make sense.
I've looked inside a 16-bay cd tower and it basically looks like a 4 port controller that's branched off to 3 other groups of 4 ports.
There has to be a way to do this. I was thinking about 2 sata hard drives in raid 0, but I still can't see that being enough throughput. It shouldn't be necessary given the duplication towers are doing it with much less effort.
JJ

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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