How many simultaneous burns can you do at once?

[wicked1]

I am trying to stress my system to the max right now. I am burning 2 DVD+RW's at 2.4 and 2 CDR's at 52X. The computer isnt keeping up very well which is kinda dissapointing.It is a 3.2 ghz system OC'd to around 3.5 with 1 gig 400 mhz RAM.I would of thought it could keep up.All 4 burners are reading from 4 different hard drives too.What is the norm for this?I could burn 1 DVD and 2 CD's without a hitch before(most of the time)is 2 DVD burners too much?I wouldnt think so because its not maxing out the IDE bus or the processor usage.I would also think that 2 DVD's at 2.4X wouldnt be that hard considering the Plextor is supposed to burn at 8X.

Edit:Oh yeah processor usage is staying around 60% and memory usage is around 800 megs used.Everything is running at full DMA modes.I was gonna add another DVD burner this week too but I am now think 3 DVD's at once is out of the question?

[aviationwiz]

Keep in mind that DVD Burners take up a lot of power as well. I think one DVD Burn at once is more than enough, unless your in Nero burning the same thing to different drives, then that should work.

[wicked1]

I tried today with Nero 6 to burn 2 DVD's at once. 1 at 8x and 1 at 4x. That didnt work too well either. The used read buffer keeps emptying and the drives are burning very slow at around 3X.Is there a way to give Nero a bigger read buffer than 80 megs?

[aviationwiz]

No

[rdgrimes]

The only reliable way you will accomplish independant burns to multiple drives is with each drive on it's own IDE channel. You can easily burn to multiple drives on the same channel if you are burning from the same process, (multiple copies of the same thing), but they have to be nearly identical drives. (same speed, same burn strategy)

[wicked1]

The only reliable way you will accomplish independant burns to multiple drives is with each drive on it's own IDE channel. You can easily burn to multiple drives on the same channel if you are burning from the same process, (multiple copies of the same thing), but they have to be nearly identical drives. (same speed, same burn strategy)

Well it looks like another controller card is going to go in this computer.I am wondering how well my Silicon Image controller will work with high speed DVD burners.It works with my 52X CD burners.I cant wait to see the IRQ issues its going to give me 1 Promise,1Silicon Image,1 on board.

[wicked1]

Well I cant get it to boot with both controller cards in there.I am sure it has something to do with both of them having a bootable bios onboard.However,I did hook up the plex 708 and the sony 500 on separate IDE channels(1 to primary 1 to secondary on board controllers) and used the promise controller for the hard drives. I sucessfully burned a DVD @ 8x and a dvd @ 4x simultaneously.Now that I know that works I just need to figure out a way to get 2 controller cards to work.

[VEFF]

I wonder if it is possible to get both controller cards to work simultaneously.
Let us know.

[wicked1]

I jumped on ebay and picked up an assortment of older controller cards (old meaning UDMA 33) for less than 10 dollars.So, maybe I can get some combo to work. I have emailed SiliconImage to see whether this is possible or not.When I was going to college I was told that you could run multiple countrollers no problem but of course no one ever tried it out.

[wicked1]

Does anyone know if this would work better? How about putting a dvdrw drive in a firewire external enclosure.Would this have enough bandwidth to do a burn simultaneously with an internal like running internally with one optical per controller?

[dodecahedron]

Ahh...SCSI...!

wicked, how did you do these multiple burns (of different data) in terms of software?
did you use different programs running concurrently? or what?

[rdgrimes]

I just need to figure out a way to get 2 controller cards to work.

Really depends on the motherboard, not the cards. They will all be bootable cards. Sometimes you can use different PCI slots to get the cards to play together, the board may be looking at certain slots first for the boot sequence. you can also fiddle with IRQ and PCI slot assigments. Some people report success by setting the board to boot to IDE on the motherboard, rather than booting to PCI, but not all boards/BIOS have this option. (You have to keep a HD on the main IDE then for booting, but only the boot files have to be on it, the OS can still be on the PCI.)
But if your BIOS does not have options for booting to PCI OR IDE, and it's scanning both for boot devices, you are screwed. Some boards will call this option "SCSI" in the boot order. But the vast magority of boards cannot boot with 2 bootable devices installed on PCI.
You might check with OCFreak, I think he holds some sort of record for the most drives installed in one system.