"On the fly recording" and two burners on same SATA channel

[Disco Makberto]

Hi, there!

I know that "On the fly recording" using two DVD burners (or one DVD-ROM and one DVD burner) is not advisable while using only one IDE channel on the same computer system since this slows down the recording process, that is, the recording process of going from master disc to copied disc. But I have a question, what would happen if I use the same set up and same process but on a SATA channel? Is there also a slow down of the recording process while using a SATA channel that is connected to two DVD burners (or one DVD-ROM and one DVD burner)? Or this only happens when an IDE drive connected to two DVD burners (or one DVD-ROM and one DVD burner)?

Greetings to all,

DiscoMak

[redwudz]

'On the fly' recording in general is error prone. SATA won't help much as the devices are still the same, just the interface is different. You would be much better off buffering to a hard drive first to take better advantage of the burners built in buffers, along with the buffering from the hard drive source. But give it a try feeding directly to two SATA burners. It might work. Just use a burning program that lets you monitor both buffers and has 'burn protection' in case of buffer failure.

[Disco Makberto]

Hi, there!

Are you saying that two SATA burners on two separate SATA channels is better when compared to two SATA burners on one single SATA channel? The separation is advised when it comes to IDE, so that is why I also asked about SATA. What would you say about using an external FW drive, for instance, combined with an internal SATA or IDE burner? They would still be separate, isn't it so?

Carlos Albert
Disco Makbert

[redwudz]

Every SATA channel is separate. Not the same as IDE/PATA. SATA uses one channel per device. The channel isn't so much the problem, it's the idea of real time copying from one drive, maybe a disc to a SATA drive. There are buffers involved. If the device you are recording from is slower that the drive, then the drive has to wait. If the device is faster than your drive, optical or other, then the data has to be queued so it can feed the burner at a steady rate. If you are hoping that this all works properly, then good luck. Sometimes it does. Other times it doesn't.

It usually works best to que a slower file to a HDD first and use that to burn from. If you read directly from a CD/DVD and expect that to burn properly to a new DVD/CD in real time, good luck. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. On-the-fly just invites problems.

[Disco Makberto]

Hey, Redwudz!

Please excuse me for my ignorance in not knowing that a SATA channel only works with one drive/device. I didn't know that.

Yes, I understand what you mean, and I am aware of the possible problems with "on the fly" recordings. One way or another, if I recall correctly, some "on the fly" burners create a temporary file on the HDD before recording to the intended final disc. I suppose that these softwares are better than those that record directly from disc to disc unless I am missing something. What do you say?

Take care,

Carlos Albert
D-Makbert

[johns0]

One thing windows does is when your sata is set as ide it will assign 2 sata devices to the same ide channel so if anything goes wrong with that ide channel it will affect both sata devices.