How many optical drives can I get?

[Red96TA]

Here's the scenerio...right now, I'm running one ide cable to two dvd-r's that I use in tandom to write disks for larger projects...

Is it feasible/possible to get the Thermaltake Shark tower (with five open bays), stick in 4 dvd-r's and write to all four at the same time?

[bazooka]

If you want coasters, go ahead.

[glockjs]

why not just get a pci ata card if you have room in your tower

[bazooka]

why not just get a pci ata card if you have room in your tower

Even of he did that, his computer does not have unlimited resources and will create coasters by trying to burn more than 1 dvd at the same time

[glockjs]

you dont think with enough ram + cpu power its possible?

[bazooka]

you dont think with enough ram + cpu power its possible?

No, because the drives already use direct memory access.

With four burners going and the os running, both ram and cpu power will probably be maxed out.

[glockjs]

juuust curious, i've never tried to burn more than at a time(no need to) not sayin Red96TA is the next detroit pirate or anything :P

just remember that bazooka is the one bearing the bad news

[Red96TA]

no...I'm not the next Detroit Pirate...I sell instructional dvd's over the internet.

I currently burn two disks at once at 4x with the buffer doing just fine...hell...I even cruise other programs and internet sites while the disks burn. Never had a problem.

I'll be moving up to a AMD 3400 before January and was looking into my options.

[bazooka]

I can't tell you what to do, but the burners need to be on separate ide channels, and if they work fine burning two at once then I would leave it at that.

Most times burning two at once would create coasters so consider yourself lucky.

There are bottlenecks you need to consider. The bottlenecks are memory, hard drive space, and cpu power.

Also most motherboards only support 4 ide drives, so where is your hard drive in this mix?

If I were you, I would buy a dedicated disc duplicator and leave your computer for other things.

[Red96TA]

I've had problems burning two different dvd's, but the ones I burn at the same time are the same dvd.

It would be nice to shell out for 2 new 108's instead of dumping $500+ on a replicator...might have no choice though

[rallynavvie]

I don't see the problem actually. I use up to 5 burners, two on IDE and 3 on FireWire, all at once with Nero and don't have a problem with it. You can really only write the same date to all of them, but the process is similar to software RAID in that it's mirroring data output to all of them. If anything you'd think the PCI interface would get choked up running data to the three burners on the 1394 card.

[Hardcoreruss]

I would invest in a duplicator, would save money in the long run.

Acard or Wytron are your friends.

[rallynavvie]

I dunno if it would. If it's a product you're planning on reselling (which has got to be the case if you're writing that many of a single image) I'd look into outsourcing that portion of it to a place that specializes in that and then bump up the price they cost you to resell to a customer.