Any Benefit to Having Two Drives

[crispy51]

I have just replaced my LG with a Pioneer 111D, mainly because the LG was read only with DVD. I'm just wondering if there would be any benefit to running with both drives.

Chris P.

[Richard_G]

It makes copying from one to another a lot easier. Also burners are not known to make good readers. I've had discs that my burner can't read but my read only can.

[hech54]

I have two burners...one is set for region 1 and the other for region 2. I hardly ever do "drive to drive" copying though....strange.....never thought of that until now.

[classfour]

Bragging Rights?????

No seriously: I actually have three (2 IDE, 1 SATA) in my desktop.

1 Plextor - fast reader on most media, except seriously damaged stuff.

1 NEC - excellent burner, most scans are above 97 in nero cdspeed.

1 Panasonic - only there for reading DVD-RAM media burned on standalone; will likely pull it at some point and use an ancient panny in external enclosure, using bay for hard drive tray.

For some reason, the Panasonic does better reading poor quality or scratched media than the other two - also a trait shared with the old panasonic drive that I have. The only reason that I can credit this is the read speed is also noteably slower than the other two - even in DMA mode.

I have actually burned 3 DVDs simultaneously (illl advised) with Alcohol: All scanned and played fine, burn was slowed to 4X on all 3 drives.....Only did it once!!!!

When I have several copies of the same disc to burn, I create a master, rip it to the hard drive on the duplicator, and burn away - better than last method...

[SingSing]

There are benifits to have two Optical drives, as well as two Hard disks.

1. Two optical drives provides CD to CDR copy for backup, believe it or not. Most softwares come in CD.

2. Older and Newer drives have different abilities to read off different type/generation of media. Like Many new DVD burners can't read 1x, or 2x CD-R/W.

3. The burned DVD reads back best on the burner it was burned on.

4. Two Hard disks make your Ifoedit, DVDshrink(folder), VOBblanker run nearly twice as fast, if your source and destination folders are on two different hard drives.

[overloaded_ide]

Well I don't think I saw anyone mention with 2 drives you can do 2 things at once

I can listen to a music CD in one drive and play a CD based game in the second drive.
I don't want every cd ripped to mp3 and stored on my system!

Anything you do like that 2 drives are useful for.

Depends how your system is built what all you all do at one time with out problems.

I don't advise it really, but you could be ripping a disk for backup and burning a disk at the same time with 2 drives if your sytem can handle it.

Alot of times I have seldom used files on CDs, when I want to take certain file with me places and they are on differnt disks I may a new RW to carry. It's nice to have one drive to read a disk in to find the files I want then just copy to the RW, never mess with the hardrive.

My daughters system I put in a CD burner and a DVDrom (I think it may be a combo with cd burner also) She uses both drive at same time alot, not sure what she's doing then.

Out of 4 systems the only one that does not have 2 drives is the wifes, it has one CD burner which is rarely used for anything other than installing drivers for cd when needed.

My main system has 2 DVD burners, my other system has Combo DVDrom/CDburner and a DVD burner.
My 2 systems I have had both drives running at once for alot of reasons.

Just bought new printers, installed one on the kids system, I was listing to MY music on CD and printing files that were on a CD also at same time on hers for testing the printer.
2 Drives, no need to copy files to the hard drive to print them then have to delete them again, no need to start my computer to access music through the network either I just stuck in a disk.

From now on all new drives will be DVD burners of course since prices are so low on them. When I built the systems that have CD burners or DVDroms the price of DVD burners was alot higher so it was well worth saving the money buying what I did buy.

[crispy51]

Many thanks for all the responses on this one, I certainly have plenty to think about. I already have two hard drives and have taken note of the benefits there.

My main problem now is finding an answer to my DVD-RAM disks burned on my external Panasonic machine. The Pioneer is supposed to be able to handle them, but I've had no luck so far.

I think without spending any more money, the best answer is to ditch RAM discs, and just use DVD-R.

Thanks again for your input,
Chris P.

[hech54]

RAM discs are a pain....in my opinion. My old LG4040B came with one...tried to use it several times....now it is in the garbage.

[RabidDog]

Many(most?) NEC drives can read ram discs .. and they are excellent burners. Havent tried it myself tho..

[crispy51]

DVD-RAM discs do have great advantages with editing, at least they do in my Panasonic. I've previously got round some of the problems after editing by using VHS, as my external Panasonic machine is a combo using both DVD and VHS. It allows me to dub from one format to the other.

I expect I'm losing out on the quality a bit, but I've noticed very little change.

Chris P.

[retiredjoker]

i know for myself having two drives is great. i can que up like 20 images with imgburn and click the "share all images among drives" setting and walk away, everyfew minutes i change the disc as one pops out, this way there is no time in between burns. as soon as one is done the other starts.

[SingSing]

Laptop replaces desktop nowaday. Ability to have multiple drives is one of last valid advantages/reasons that why we are still working with desktop PCs.

[garryheather]

Cup holder and somewhere to keep your biscuits during those long gaming sessions ??

[overloaded_ide]

"Laptop replaces desktop nowaday. Ability to have multiple drives is one of last valid advantages/reasons that why we are still working with desktop PCs. "

Not at all. Laptops may be great, I don't have one so I don't know. But I do know I could never cram this much stuff inside a laptop like I have my Tower

The size is just not there. Then when you have to buy expensive specail laptop cards, ram, CPU, drives, etc... when you need to upgrade the Tower starts looking good agian!

I'd love to have a laptop for many reasons myself, but it could never replace my desktop or tower systems I have now. Where would I put 4 Hard drives and 2 burners?? And when I wnat to swap the hard drives between my system and another system, what's the compatability there with the conectors and power?

[DarrellS]

I use 2 Liteon Dual Layer Combo drives which works fine for me since they will handle all the media and tasks that I work with. My friend has three optical drives. A CD-RW, a DVD burner and a comdo drive.
I'm thinking about getting a new ASUS motherboard that will hold 6 EIDE drives and 4 SATA drives and put the CD-RW out of my 98SE machine in it, adding another 200GB P-ATA drive and three more S-ATAs. I'll definately need a bigger power supply if I do.

[videobread]

I have two Pioneer A109's and burn two images at a time. I use Instant Copy. I needed two of the same drives, mfg, and same firmware on each drive to get it to work. It does not work with protected dvd's (movies). The advantage is that I produce DVD's twice as fast. Someone said they have used Alcohol with three different drives. I read that it will burn to multiple drives. Alway wondered how it worked.

[smitbret]

Yep, the PSU is going to be the weak spot if you're not really generous with it (600 Watt, probably). I have 3 IDE HDD, 2 IDE DVD-Burners and one external USB burner. I can burn to all three at the same time without a hitch.... with some stipulations. I have a 430W Codegen PSU and if I try simultaneously burning an image from each drive to each Burner respectively, the computer will usually crash and reboot. I can burn two images from two drives to two burners and have no problems. I can also burn one image to all 3 burners without a hitch, too. In short, as long as I limit the power drain to 2 or fewer HDD, then the system is fine. Once I kick in that last HDD, it's just too much to run the system, three drives and three burners. Any kind of up to date system should have enough resources to be able to handle multiple burns running simultaneously unless it's bloated with background activities.
-Brett

I use 2 Liteon Dual Layer Combo drives which works fine for me since they will handle all the media and tasks that I work with. My friend has three optical drives. A CD-RW, a DVD burner and a comdo drive.
I'm thinking about getting a new ASUS motherboard that will hold 6 EIDE drives and 4 SATA drives and put the CD-RW out of my 98SE machine in it, adding another 200GB P-ATA drive and three more S-ATAs. I'll definately need a bigger power supply if I do.

[videobread]

Interesting. My dual burner system is an HP4100 workstation with plenty of power and RAM. It burns two at a time and they play on most all players. I have sent thousand of DVD's out in the past 3 years and only had one set of 4 DVD's that would not play on someone's home player. I sent them another brand disc and all was well. My problem is I get bad scans. Really crappy scans. I've tried disconecting on burner and even with a one burner system I still get bad scans. I've tried it on both drives. I have the latest firmware. I have an 80 pin IDE cable. I have this problem with A109's. I've gone back and scanned DVD's from my old A106's and get the same scans. But they all play fine in most all machines. Also, I have never had a disc skip on viewing. Also, The scans are the same with my source material or backing up movies.

[strummy53]

Having 2 burners has always worked great for me. Using Alcohol, I'm able to burn 2 backup's of my movies(one for each of the kids) at the same time with no problems with playbacks. I'm going to experiment with 3 at the same time soon. Also ripping at the same time works for me too, with little lag and no errors. I've burned 2 disc at a time with Nero but I had to start the program, start the burn, and then start the program again and start the burn again......too time consuming. Alcohol is the trick for mutiple burns. Just my 2 cents

[videobread]

Thanks for the tip on Alcohol. Just bought the boxed set online. Can't wait to give it a try.