Multiple drive setup

Computer Hardware
#1

hi
bit of newbie on hardware technicalities, but i built my pc so i know a little

i’m building a pc (or a few) to make multiple copies of dvds

at the moment, i plan to run 2 hdds off mb sata, and optical drives off ide.

question, would it be recommended to run 2 drives per ide (total 4 drives), or only 1 drive per ide.

fast production is the main concern

i suppose i’m asking if it would be better to have 4 drives doing 8x, or 2 drives doing 16x

at the moment setup is:
mb - asus p5s800vm
hdd - seagate 8mb, 80gb sata
dvd - lg 4163b
setup is flexible though…

cheers

alex

#2

Are you talking about burning the same file to all four optical drives, or different files to each optical drive? If you are burning the exact same file to all 4 drives, it will be a little faster than burning to two at a time. If you are going to be wanting to do this on a regular basis, you should look into duplicators with multiple drives.

#3

i’m not to sure, i’m building the system for someone else
i just found some stuff on duplication towers and seems to be a more suitable solution.

i’ve read a bit about the wytron dvd399… one site said it can do ‘double-speed’?? if equipping the system with 8 or 16 speed burners, will the system be able to handle doing 9 drives at 8x?

#4

Burning simultaneously to 2 burners on one channel is quite possible, but may be speed-limited. It depends on the controller and the drives. Drives that use WOPC at higher speeds will probably foil the effort when they pause to re-calibrate at different times, so 4x may be the max speed possible. It’s going to be trial and error. This may also be true for drives on separate channels, as the burning program may well pause both drives when one of them pauses. Again, trial and error.

But your proposed setup is a good one, although a duplicator will undoubtedly be faster.

#5

thanks

i’ll run the duplicator past them, and to me this seems to best option too

this forum is great, thanks again

alex