I currently have a athlon 4000 duo , 2gb ram, 500w PSU , and 3 DVD Burners. And on internal 750 hD It seems when I add a 4th burner discs start to go bad way more often. I wondered if the the cause is the PSU not being able to push voltage for all of it, or if its a bottleneck on the MB , Or any advice on building an ideal Multiple 4 disc burning PC. Thanks
A CD/DVD Duplicator could be an option. Or get a Quad Core PC, maybe the dual core can't handle 4 burners.
That doesn't make sense to me... Burning uses very little CPU. It does use some RAM, but only whatever it needs as a buffer... 2GB should be more than enough. What software are you using? Try something light if you already are not. See if ImgBurn can do what you want. The MB (actually interface) is possible. Are you using SATA or PATA? PATA would have a limit of about 66MB/s, so at 22x, two burners on one cable would be going at about 58MB/s. Odds are that you will not get 66MB/s, so you may not get steady speed and there could be some issues when the disc is being written. I don't know if SATA DVD burners operate at faster than UDMA4. What speed are you burning at? Most of the time, disc issues are caused by burning to fast on cheap discs. Only certain discs are actually capable of faster than 8x burning without errors. I would only trust Taiyo Yunden and Singapore made Verbatim. Try setting burn speed to 8x max. The slower the speed, the less chance of errors. I still use 4x so I won't have to worry about coasters. Another thing to check, is to make sure that the burners are not operating in PIO mode. This is much slower and will cause problems. You can check this in device manager. Also note that installing some games installs rootkit virus that will cripple your DVD Drives. Same for some DVD movies that are played on your PC. The result can be Drives failing and burning coasters. Also, rip speed can be limited as well as burn speed....
I tried a duplicator tower before, they have so little ram in them they take FOREVER to burn discs. I had a 6 slot tower over 20 minute burn time unless you pay the bucks for the big boys which are totally not worth it for what Iam doing. IMGBURN wont burn from multiple recorders or I would use it. I use NERO now its the only one I can find that will even do it. I burn a bit too many discs to run at 8X, I run at 16x now, All drives have their own sata port. I dont play games on the pc at all, and If Im burning a game to play or something I burn at 4x, but this is for buisness/commercial use and needs to push out about 60 - 100 discs a day, quick as possible I do not see anything for a PIO mode in device manager properties for the drives
Have you tried the ImgBurn Queue? I know that can be used to burn several images with multiple drives, but maybe you can also burn several copies with multiple drives as well. You can access it with "ctrl+alt+Q". I've never used it myself, but it may be what you need. I ditched Nero for ImgBurn when it came out as I believe it is superior and uses far less resources. 2GB of RAM should be enough. Maybe you have to set a higher RAM buffer. I have 8 seconds of buffer when I burn, so maybe you can try the same. 100MB would be about 1 second, so you can try 800MB of RAM buffer if that is possible. At 60 - 100 discs a day, burning at 4x would yield 16 discs per hour, or 6 hours 15 minutes for 100 discs. At 8x, this halves to 3 hours 8 minutes hours and at 16x it is 1 hour 34 minutes. 8x is not killing much time. There is also 12x, which would burn in 2 hours 5 minutes. You can also consider replication. This would be anywhere from $.50 - $.70 per disc depending on how many discs you need, but you will definitely meet your business demands.
PIO mode does not exist in SATA; don't worry about that. Idea 1: Nero comes with a bunch of system-crashing programs that install themselves without permission & also start without permission. If you look in task manager, you will probably find 3-4 programs starting with "NM" - these programs are terrible, they randomly cause the system to hickup, ruining dvds & media center recordings. Kill these, replace them with a dummy exe, and see if that fixes things. Idea 2: Do you have a USB burner to test as drive #4? I know it's a longshot, but it might work.
