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4 DVD-RW Drives, Can I Burn 3 DVD's At Once?


Redhatcc

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I have no answer for you but I'm bumping this thread in anticipation that someone else does. You may also want to write directly to Nero and other companies though, because certainly this has come up before.

If all else fails, with enough RAM / CPU horsepower you could approximate this with three instances of some burner software each with their own copied disk image (since no doubt any one file would be locked). Ugly, but it should be do-able.

BTW, with three DVD burners I would plan on expecting the lights in the room to dim just a little. I am sure I have seen DVD burning cause minor sagging on the same circuit. This will also be a fairly good test of your particular power supply. But heck, that's how we learn stuff! :thumbup

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is there any software that will let me put a dvd in one of the dvdrw drives and burn to the other 3 at the same time?

Yes, 2 that I know of and have used in the past for just the same thing.

Nero will allow burning to multiple drives on the fly, so will Alcohol 120%.

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well what i have is a customer that has a tower with 1 dvd-rw but wants to be able to burn multiple dvd's at once without having to buy one of them burning towers for like $1k or so... although a good cpu, good ram, and lowering the burn speed would be important, you say Nero or Alcohol 120 should do it?

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Some tests need to be made on the actual hardware, ANYWAY.

OS resources, data transfer may simply not be enough, and additionally you may FORGET about working on the PC while it's burning.

Since the $1K seems to me a bit pessimistic:

http://www.produplicator.com/cd-duplicator...wer-1-to-2.html

http://www.produplicator.com/cd-duplicator...wer-1-to-3.html

Buying a dedicated tower seems to me more logical, if the need is for burning even a small number of Cd's.

Otherwise, I would suggest going along the suggestions in this old thread:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f59/burn-two-cds-once-61821/

Seeing if a very low resource using software, such a IMGBURN or apps like Dirk Paehl's ones based on command-line CRD-tools:

http://www.paehl.de/home.htm

http://dpaehl.dd6338.kasserver.com/cdr/burniso.php

http://dpaehl.dd6338.kasserver.com/cdr/CD_DVD_COPY.php

work with more instances concurrently (they should :))

jaclaz

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On the rig in my signature I have burned 4 DVD's at a time using 3 external DVD-RW drives and the internal drive from an image file loaded in Daemon Tools with Nero 9.0.9.4 by means of "Use multiple recorders" feature in Nero Burning ROM. So, yes, it can be done, but I can't tell you what resources the process(es) are taking up since I was using the laptop to to something else while recording was in progress (and I burned 200 DVD's using this method for my office. Don't ask how long it took but I finished 3 six-packs before it finished :D ).

PS. Could some moderator please move this to the appropriate forum since this is not about Windows XP? Thanks!

Edited by nitroshift
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Could some moderator please move this to the appropriate forum since this is not about Windows XP? Thanks!

Are you running Nero under Linux or FreeBSD? :unsure:

:P

jaclaz

"Software Hangout" would seem a better place to me... Just my $0.02 :P

Edited by nitroshift
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i havent tried nero 9 yet im still stuck on nero 7.5 but i will try, i dont have a jam up great machine but i will post me experience for future ref. anyone else would need and thanks for the reply

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Remember that making CDs and DVDs is a real-time process. If the data flow pauses/stops to any of the burners for any reason you could make a coaster ...

That's why "buffer underrun protection" was invented.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_underrun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BurnProof#Buf...rrun_protection

If this was to be done professionally I would look for a way to memory map whatever is going to be burned and using SATA drives in AHCI mode, because that would eliminate almost any I/O interruption IMO.

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  • 2 months later...

I have four burners that I use actively. The problem, is quite simply, a throughput issue. Buffer underrun protection is not a perfect solution and should not be relied upon. There's a miniscule gap left by the process that can, with poor quality or sensitive playback equipment, cause the device to halt while watching the movie.

The problem is in two parts.

The first is that the data stream must be kept up in raw throughput, which varies from 5.54MB/sec at 4x up to 22.16MB/sec at 16x. Burning four DVDs at 16x would require up to 88.64MB/sec of sustained transfer which most drives simply can't do. Four DVDs at 4x would only require 22.16MB/sec, which is easily done with even the most modest of drives, however this bring is to part two of the problem.

Being random access. Obviously, the more DVDs that you burn simultaneously, the more there will dispersed random I/O all over the drive, which in turn jams up the drive command queue and can quickly bring the data throughput to a crawl. And of course, it cascades making it worse the more drives are trying to burn at once. Drive fragmention will also increase to compound the issue.

With two 74GB Western Digital 10000RPM SATA Raptors running in RAID 0 with Pioneer DVR-216D SATA DVD-RWs drives, and fully defragmented data, I was never reliably able to burn more then two DVDs at 4x each at the same time (without buffer underruns). At three, I was sometimes able to manage to sucessfully burn without buffer underruns but the second anything would require disk activity (screen saver, windows service, e-mail that came in, anything), all three drives would underrun while the hard drives caught up.

The only true solution for multi-drive burning is to burn from a high speed, high I/O device that can sustain the high load required for this. An SSD drive or a RAM drive are about the only devices on the market at this time capable of sustaining such demand.

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jcarle what is the read benchmark on your raid 0 unit and what controller does it use?

Also note that even if the drive is told to burn at 16X that is the maximum rate which only occurs when on the outer cylinder; however it would be wise IMO to use it as a baseline.

In addition to putting the image file in a ram disk, using the OS in a PE environment hosted in RAM would probably help too.

Depending on the size of the image file, 64 bits may make a difference too but I am unsure atm.

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