DVD Drives

[starfox_2100]

Hi All

I burn a lot of DVD’s on my PC. At the moment I have a 1 burner.

I am planning on installing 3 burners altogether. So that I can burn disks at the same time.

Please could you tell me if this is possible.

The spec of my system is:

P4 1.5Ghz
512MB SDRAM PC133
80 GB HDD

I am planning on buying 3 NEC 3500A DVD+/-RW Dual Layer 8.5Gb 16x Writer drives

Thanks…..

[deddard]

Hi - Welcome Aboard!

Short answer - yes it should be possible. apps such as nero support burning to more than one disk at a time.
one potential problem I could see is your memory. bear in mind that when writing to a cd or dvd, the system 'buffers' the information being written, which uses memory (this is why cd drives etc come with their own buffer) and there is not really any such thing as writing to more than one place at a time - everything is done on a time-sharing basis. because of this last fact, you should really make sure you have enough physical memory - large files being written will seriously chew your system up, and if background activity becomes a nuisance, it can interrupt the writing process. Stick an extra 512MB of RAM in there if you want to do this, XP (I'm assuming you are running XP) likes lots of memory - and check the software you use to ensure it has the capability of burning to several disks at once, and if there is any compatibility issues with the newer drives.

[saphalline]

Ooh, I don't know about adding more memory. With PC133 SDRAM, adding another 512MB could be quite expensive - about $100 these days. I think as long as you can fit 3 DVD burners in your system, you should be able to burn to them all at once. Just make sure your HDD is defragged and I wouldn't suggest trying to use it while it's burning.

[starfox_2100]

I seen in another post that this can not be done, becase the IDE channel is really busy and won't be able to handle three drives.

Is this ture?

[Paul Komski]

From Nero Burning ROM 5.5 Help Files
Owners of the retail version of Nero can also burn simultaneously on more than
one recorder if they have more than one installed.

I have never done it but if the same data is being burned to the same media at the same time I don't see why this should be particularly taxing on memory - the analogy being writing to mirrored hard drives in a RAID0 set up. The main thing with burning is to not allow the process to be interupted - the data must be written in one continuous stream, which is why buffer underrun protection has been developed. Of course if thing do go ends up you will have multiple coasters at the same time too.

[deddard]

From Nero Burning ROM 5.5 Help Files
The main thing with burning is to not allow the process to be interupted - the data must be written in one continuous stream, which is why buffer underrun protection has been developed. Of course if thing do go ends up you will have multiple coasters at the same time too.

This is the only reason I mentioned shoving in extra RAM - each disk cannot actually be burned at the same time (although it will appear so) so the info has to hang around in memory a bit longer, and knowing how windoze likes to go off and do it's own thing, interruptions can occur which take up memory. I guess that with cds being as cheap as they are, it could be worth trying without the extra memory. I just get paranoid around windoze :D

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Yeah.
And all this with a home computer? One that doesn't have ANY of the two pages worth of Startup Programs in msconfig UNCHECKED! And runs 24/7 to boot on Win98! :eek:

Scary, isn't it? :D

I almost XP'd myself... :o