2 Burners, Same IDE, burning Simultaneously?

lafa_156 2005-08-23 10:36:52 UTC #1

I have an Athlon64, 1gb RAM, Asus A8V, SATA HDD. I have 2 burners on the same IDE (Plextor 716 & Nec 3540). Is it possible to burn the same image from my SATA HDD, to both burners in the same time? Even at 8x, or will it cause problems?

Thank you

rdgrimes 2005-08-23 11:16:45 UTC #2

Short answer is no.

In order to burn to multiple drives from the same instance of Nero (or any other software), they have to be identical drives. This is true whether they are on the same channel or not.
You can, however, burn to 2 drives from 2 instances of Nero, but they must be on separate channels. This assumes that your HD is capable of delivering data fast enough, and very few HD's can do 2 simultaneous 8x burns. 4x-6x is usually the speed limit for 2 burns unless you have a Raptor or SCSI hard drive.

drpino 2005-08-24 01:43:38 UTC #3

i would respectfully disagree...i've burned the same image from one instance of Nero to 3 separate drives successfully...gonna try 4 different drives next...

lafa_156 2005-08-24 01:48:25 UTC #4

what speed did you use?

drpino 2005-08-24 01:49:31 UTC #5

8x for 3 at the same time because one of them is 8x max...but i've also burned to 2 simultaneously at 12x and 16x...

lafa_156 2005-08-24 02:02:04 UTC #6

no buffer problems?

drpino 2005-08-24 02:03:48 UTC #7

nope

Kenshin 2005-08-24 14:52:36 UTC #8

Naturally, it's best to have multiple controllers and multiple channels. Wider and more is better. On the destination side, the recording drives better be of the same model and it's also better to use exactly same types of media from the same spindle case. But I've done some tests using various drives and various types of media on one instance of Nero or multiple instances of Nero... at various speeds from 1x to 8-12x, but never tried 16x since I'd had very few media that are good enough for 16x burning on most DVD burners.

If you have to burn to two DVD drives on one IDE, better connect 1:1 like this:

Primary Channel (Connector #1): first DVD burner (either Master or Slave)
Secondary Channel (Connector #2): second DVD burner (either Master or Slave)

It's good in that the source drive is located on SATA side which should help distribute the load a lot. First try at low speeds and try higher speeds later.