Burning 2 disks at once?

[ashsharma]

After complaining to Dell about about the low burning speeds of my DVD+R drive they sent me a replacement drive. But they forgot to takeaway the other drive which works fine just a firmware problem.

So anyway, at the moment I've got one DVD+R and one DVD-rom installed on my PC and the new spare DVD+R drive just in the box. Is there any point replacing the rom with the burner? Would I be able to burn 2 separate films at the same time?

Or should I just sell it?

[jimmalenko]

I think you would be able to burn two at once - I seem to recall Nero has a tickbox for multiple burners. IMO I would sell it and keep the ROM because the ROM will rip faster than the burner. How many times do you expect to need to burn two copies of anything ?

[ashsharma]

Yeah, it's unlikely I'm going to be burning 2 copies but would I be able to burn 2 different films or audio cds at the same time?

I think the ripping speed should be ok, cos the rom is about 3 years old anyway so probably low speed anyway.

what about the laser wearing out? do dvd burners die after a while? I could split the burning between the 2 drives to prolong their life or something.

[BobK]

Or you could buy a controller card ($30-$40, I've seen them for $15 or less on eBay). Then you could use both burners and still have the ROM for ripping.

I wouldn't spend the extra $ since you said you don't need to burn 2 disks at a time. Just leave the ROM in and save the 2nd burner for a backup if the other one quits.

Even with 2 different burners I don't think you can burn 2 different movies at the same time.

[DTSL06]

Burning multiple bkups is not a probm if u have a capable enuf system. I been able to do 3 DVD bkups at once after I ripped the orginals to seperate HD's. I have an internal Plextor IDE , Pioneer firewired and NEC USB2.0. The key is to make sure the ripped files are on seperate HD's. I tried putting them on the same HD and some times this fails, even thu the HD was set up in RAID 0 and is fast. I tend to use diff progm also when I am multiple copying. DVDShrink for 1, CloneDVD for 2nd and CloneDVD2 for the 3rd. But I only do this rarely since I really dont need to do 3 at once unless a deadline. But I do 2 copies at once a lot and no probm so far, real handy for those multi disk DVD's.

[ashsharma]

OK, I've whacked in the new drive. But how do you rename the drives in XP. They're identical drives so I want to be able to tell the difference between them.

[DTSL06]

OK, I've whacked in the new drive. But how do you rename the drives in XP. They're identical drives so I want to be able to tell the difference between them.

XP shld auto assign a drive letter to the each drive. If u want to rename, just right click on the drive icon and rename option.

EDIT:
Oops u cant do a rename. Sorry

[teegee420]

You can't change the name of CD/DVD drives but you can change the drive letter. Go to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management.