Im building a new computer, need advise from the real Geeks.

  • Thread starter Thread starter darrin_h2000
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darrin_h2000

darrin_h2000

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Im looking to build one with a case that has 5 bays for cd drives, and I would like to use 4 of the bays to duplicate CDs. I was thinking that if I use one as the master, then use 4 as slaves I could burn one at a time with the master, or I could burn 4 at a time on the slave drives. Is there any reason why this cannot be done? Has anyone built a machine like this?
 
Most consumer CD burning software only supports one destination drive at a time. There are dedicated CDR duplicators out there that do exactly whatv you described, but I have not heard of someone doing it with off-the-shelf componants
 
Most consumer CD burning software only supports one destination drive at a time.
Nero lets you open more than one instance at a time. Burning however may be a different issue.
 
Well, the newest beta version of CDR-WIN supports multiple drives at the same time...

Multi-Recorder support is the first new feature to be added to version 4.0A. Now you can record on a maximum of 32 recorders simultaneously (depending on system speed). At this time, only MMC compliant drives are supported (almost all recorders made in the last two years are MMC compliant). Only SCSI based recorders have been tested so far, but many IDE recorders should work as well.
We will be adding many more features to this version in the coming months.

Promise (and other companies) makes a 2-channel add-in IDE card that you could hang four IDE burners off of. It might work, but I would be more comfortable recommending SCSI units like the PLextor 12x burners. Unfortunately, Plextor is not making their awesome 40x burner in SCSI.

Basically, there's nothing wrong with IDE burners. They used to suck, but are excellent now.

But SCSI still has the advantage of multitasking better and transferring data to multiple devices on the same bus. That would be the safe bet.
 
Good luck burning to 2 burners on the same IDE channel at the same time. Good luck getting good results with Promise and Highpoint ATA cards and many burners. If you attempt anything like this you'll definately want drives with buffer underrun protection!

I agree that SCSI would be the answer, but at the same time I don't think that burning to four burners at once is going to work well at all for you.

As was mentioned above, they make duplication devices like what you're describing. You might have to throw a couple thousand into it, but then you're going to have to dump a whole lot of money into the proposed system and it might not even work.

Slackmaster 2000
 
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