Burning simultaneously with blu ray possible?

[ninus3d]

Can I burn an image (the same image) on 4 blu ray drives at once?
And what would be required of me to do so (both hardware and software)

I work at a QA office and we get a new build of the games we work on
around every 2nd day, we then need this build distributed to around 20 consoles so alot of time is wasting because we dont have a good solution
at the moment! Any help would be incredibly awesome

[Ian]

You could do this a couple of ways. The first way, you could get four internal or external Blu-ray drives and hook them up to your computer. Nero used to be able to write to multiple drives at a time but I'm not sure if it can do that with Blu-ray and/or four drives. Anyone know?

Since you're going to be doing this often, your other option would be to buy a Blu-ray duplicator. You can buy a tower with 2, 4 or more drives in it. The cheaper ones hook up to your computer via USB and use software installed on it. Otherwise there are standalone units with built in hard drives.

[ninus3d]

Thanks for the reply Ian
For some strange reasons, even more so since we have one for dvd
already, they dont want to buy one for BluRay.

It will most likely be 4 internal drives but my main concern is how i spread
the datastreams around. How much data does a steady burning of a
BR disc need? Can I run 2 drives on 1 controller or do I need as much
as 4 individual S-ATA controllers (including the one on the motherboard)
OR are there some fancy way to send the stream to all burners, since
its the same data?

I will love every one of you who even give me a hint here

[Ian]

It will most likely be 4 internal drives but my main concern is how i spread
the datastreams around. How much data does a steady burning of a
BR disc need? Can I run 2 drives on 1 controller or do I need as much
as 4 individual S-ATA controllers (including the one on the motherboard)
OR are there some fancy way to send the stream to all burners, since
its the same data?

When writing at 2x, the transfer rate is at 72Mbps. Serial ATA can more than handle this. Unless there is some limitation I don't know about, you should be able to use the same controller and put a drive on each port.

The biggest limiation will probably be the hard drive where you have the image stored. Even then, most drives should be able to handle the demands of four Blu-ray drives writting at 2x as the transfer rate would be only 288Mbps (36MB/s).

[ninus3d]

Thanks alot for those inputs Ian.
I will run a raid 0 mode with some higher quality disks and yeah, try to
do some basic testing of this and update this post for anyone else
beeing interested in the same information when i have som definite
specs

Once again, thanks

[dolphinius_rex]

Stick with Panasonic BD-R drives, they produce much better burn quality results with most media. If you end up with LG drives, don't burn at full speed, or your consoles will have problems reading the latter part of the discs.

I did some research into this when helping another game firm pick out a BD-R tower

And really, I HIGHLY recommend re-evaluating getting a dedicated tower. It's a little more money in the beginning, but it's less work and frustration on going... and computer systems have so many better uses then just being tied up with burning discs day in and day out.

[hoxlund]

before anyone asks, no i don't rent my system out.... hmm unless you throw in a free blu-ray burner for me to keep