We did it! 7 CDRW drives- all burning at once!

[joelen]

A while back, I asked if anyone knew of a software package that could burn to multiple CDRW drives at the same time. Padus Disk Juggler and a product called CD-Mate were suggested.

Well I am happy to report that even though the Padus software could not do it, the CD-Mate software worked! We have built 2 systems, one with 4 CDRW drives, and one with 7! They are IDE drives, using ATA 100 Promise Controllers to allow for all the drives. People told us that we would never pull it off with IDE, but we did. The 4 burner system is even using a ECS K7SEM MB!

Both systems have a 1.6 Athlon XP- we tried using a Pentium 4 1.6, but suprisingly, it would not do it.

With these systems, you can burn 4 (or 7) CD's at once, our tests were with 550MBs of data- took about 12-13 minutes for all 7, about 11 minutes for the 4. Makes duplicating CDs a lot easier when multiple copies of uhm, driver CD's (yeah, that's it!) are needed.

Take a look....

<a href="http://www.tdn.net/templates/tdn/product.asp?sid=7AB6276E30AC464DA85FBD969C6E00E7&p rodid=FSP90V" target="_blank">4 CDRW System</a>

<a href="http://www.tdn.net/templates/tdn/product.asp?sid=7AB6276E30AC464DA85FBD969C6E00E7&p rodid=FSP90" target="_blank">7 CDRW System</a>

(By the way- the prices posted are RETAIL. Wholesale pricing is available. I am not posting this thought to sell anything- just wanted to brag )

[xschmittyx]

Cool. Yeah I always need to mass produce my ummm, driver cds.

If it takes 12 mins to burn 7 cds, why not just use 8x drives in stead of 32x?

[joelen]

Because the 32X burners are the smallest ones we are stocking right now that work- we had some 8x burners at first, and they were not compatible with the software- so we put in the 32's. Our cost, they are about the same price anyway.

It works out about 2 minues a CD. We have not had access to Media faster than 16x, so that is actually the fastest we can burn right now. We have yet to test with 32x CDs to see what it is really capable of.

[Poseidon]

Good job.

Do you know where I could get a similar case? Or perhaps you guys sell me one? I am looking for just empty case - without PS.

[da_grinch]

Whoa, that's cool. I thought I was over doing my PC with my four IDE devices on one Promise controller but you guys take the cake!

[Jallentino]

Impressive, I love a good challenge.

[joelen]

The funny part about this is that it started out as a joke- my boss kept needing me to burn copies of our driver cds- about 100 at a crack- and I told him that I was going to build a system out of our stock parts with a mess of promise controllers and as many drives as i could line up on the desk.... we laughed about it for a while, but then i got curious to see if it would work, so I built... took a while to get it working just right, but then our owner saw it, got excited about it- and the rest is history!

Just for the record- there is nothign cooler than the sound of 7 CDRW drives ejecting at once.