An old thread revisited - dvd duplicators

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers
#1

There was some good discussion on simultaneous dvd burning about 3 years ago on this forum. I did a bit of searching and did not find anything quite as comprehensive as that thread, but three years is quite old in the IT industry. I could not decide which forum was the most appropriate place to post this, so please feel free to move it.

I would like to pick your brains on the subject again. I want to made a dvd duplicator that will make 6 copies of the same file/movie/music, etc at the same time. I am hoping to have a machine that will hum along at at least 4x. and will handle the usual hodge podge of disks: cdr cdrw, dvdr dvdrw. Most of the posts that I have read are looking to make 2 or 3 at one time but there were some looking for as many as 8. My questions are:

  1. I have seen dedicated duplicators to do this task but I have not heard good results from the ones that are cheap enough for mortal man to buy. What have you heard?

  2. What are the minimum hardware requirements (cpu & memory)? Keep in mind…many of the posts that I read on this site and others were made by people wanting to “recycle” an older machine, i.e. a P3 or a 1.0 mhz celeron.

  3. What kind of software will make 6 (or as many as 8) simultaneous copies - either Windows or Linux? Linux is preferable, of course because it would drop the cost of this project to hardware only.

  4. What kind of interfaces are best suited for this, i.e. eide, usb, sata, firewire, scsi?

  5. Is it better to copy the original movie/file etc to the hard drive and burn from the hard drive, or just plop the original disk into a dvd drive and copy from the original?

  6. Which mfg of dvdrw’s tend to make drives that are more suitable for this kind of work?

  7. A fundamental question that I have never seen addressed - How big of a power supply will someone need to make all of this squeal? Are external drives a better option than internal? It would make the power supply a moot issue. Can usb and firewire be daisy chained?

  8. I have seen some pci duplicator cards that will facilitate this task. How do they work?