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Mass DVD duplication with a PC
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hornak
Suspended due to non-functional email address
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2. January 2003 @ 18:15 |
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I was looking to configure a PC with up to 7 DVD Pioneer A-05's.. I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations regarding a hardware and software setup.
jeff
www.reelaudiomedia.com
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z0diac
Member
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3. January 2003 @ 01:26 |
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Well, I don't know the specs on the Pioneer A-05 but if it won't work unless it's SCSI. If it is, Nero can burn to multiple output drives. Just so long as your scsi bus is quick because that's a lotta data passing on it.
you MIGHT be able to burn to 2 DVDs at once if the burners are IDE - but not at full speed (since the master/slave devices on both IDE channels share the same pipeline)
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_Ranger
Newbie
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3. January 2003 @ 01:52 |
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You might want to try putting the IDE dries in external USB2 cases as the max bandwidth on USB2 is 480 mbps.
Just an idea!
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hornak
Suspended due to non-functional email address
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3. January 2003 @ 05:02 |
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What about a raid controller? I'm essentially looking to duplicate a duplicator.. Also Nero notes that it has two seperate licenses, 1. for up to 7 burners and a second that supports up to 32 burners.. any info?
www.reelaudiomedia.com
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Coffdog
Junior Member
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3. January 2003 @ 05:13 |
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@hornak
The bottom line ends up being that you will need to run a SCSI bus to do this. That is the only way you will get the bandwidth to do this. IDE is just not made for this and you will have nothing but issues even if you find a way to connect 7 drives.
-Coffdog
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Senior Member
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3. January 2003 @ 18:08 |
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Maxtor sells an adapter card for $49.95 USD that operates 4 additional devices. I don't know if there is a limit on the number of cards you can install. See Maxtor link for more info on card: http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/accessories/ultra_ata/ultra_ata_133_pci_adapter_card/index.htm . (This card is the same idea as the RAID card, however, I don't know of a RAID card that drives devices other than hard drives.)
While I think you could swing your project with this Maxtor IDE controller card, others have invented this wheel before, and they used SCSI. Cut to the chase, and ask NERO and Maxtor what they suggest. It's their products.
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Staff Member
2 product reviews
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3. January 2003 @ 20:19 |
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Personally I would do this with SCSI, but if you want to go with IDE, the Maxtor card mentioned above should work. I have one of those cards, but I only run hard drives from it, so I can't say what kind of performance you will get with DVD burners. I can tell you that it is essentially a Promise controller card (or at least the one I have is).
If you want to get as many drives as possible in the system you should be careful of adding more than one drive to an IDE channel. I've seen this cause problems burning CD's with an 8x burner so I would stick with one drive to a channel. If you disable the serial ports and parallel port and don't have any cards besides sound and video you should be able to add 3 IDE cards (6 channels) to your PC. Assuming you stick with 1 drive per channel and only the hard drive(s) on the first motherboard channel, that would allow you to have 7 DVD burners.
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z0diac
Member
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3. January 2003 @ 22:50 |
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My question is: why does this guy want to waste the money and hassle of putting 7 writers into a computer setup?? If you're wanting 7 writers it's *obviously* for mass-production business reasons. So just get a DVD standalone multi-writer unit. There's lots out there that even have autoloading features.
http://www.octave.com/cgi-bin/shop/shop.cgi/id/24.150.3.26-1041669724-0/choice/Duplicators
That link is only something I came across quickly, but you can get standalone units where you simply pop in the master DVD into the DVD-reader, pop in like 100 blank DVDs into the bay, press a button, and it starts recording away on anywhere from 1 to 7 writers simultaneously.
That's the only way to do it... don't waste your time fidgeting with computer specs. If you need it for business (which you obviously do if you need 7 writers) just get a standalone unit. It'll have paid for itself in a month or two.
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Senior Member
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4. January 2003 @ 00:16 |
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The link given above by Zodiac gives good info on units to mass produce CD/DVD's. Like I said, this wheel has been invented before. Spend the xtra money, and avoid the wasted time and agravation. You'll be dollars ahead.
Interesting enough, the DVD unit I checked out at the Octave link uses an IDE internal interface! They could probably improve by going SCSI, but this would cost more.
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Staff Member
2 product reviews
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5. January 2003 @ 07:02 |
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I agree that it would be better to buy a standalone unit. I was just saying that if you wanted to do it with a PC you could. The 2 issues here, as I see it would be Standalone vs. PC and IDE vs. SCSI.
Standalone vs. PC:
- Setting up a PC as a DVD replicator is more work than buying one and you will have a hard time finding anyone who has done it to help you out if you run into problems. If you buy a standalone unit you don't have to worry about setting it up internally and should be able to get support from the manufacturer or reseller if you have problems.
- While the architecture used in a standalone is probably very similar to a standard PC, it will be running an OS that is dedicated to DVD burning. That means that you won't have to worry about other, unrelated parts of the OS causing you problems and I would guess that most of the standalone units out there are probably running some sort of Linux, which is more stable than Windows anyway.
- You can get a standalone that you can run from your PC, either as a network device or a peripheral for your PC, so you can still run it through a Windows interface.
IDE vs. SCSI:
- While IDE drives and controllers are cheaper, SCSI drives tend to be have lower failure rates.
- SCSI has faster data transfer rate so you can connect more drives to a single controller without having problems.
- IDE drives are higher quality now than they have ever been. If you do some research you should be able to buy a good IDE drive.
I think the best possible solution would be a standalone unit with SCSI drives, but I don't really see any reason you can't get a good IDE based unit for a good price.
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