#1 Burning Software

I am currently evaluating the demo version of StarBurn SDK and I have a few question:

I need to be able to write to multiple drives simultaneously. From the documentation on your website I learned that StarBurn SDK supports this provided the host PC is equiped with sufficient memory/horsepower.

I am using an Intel P4 630 (3Ghz) with 2GB RAM and a 73GB Ultra-320 SCSI harddisk (it's a Dell PowerEdge SC430).
I have several options of connecting DVD-recorders to this system:
1. Plextor PX-716A IDE with Firewire-1394A/IDE bridgeboard connected to FireWire-1394A HBA (PCI).
2. Plextor PX-716A IDE with FireWire-1394B/IDE bridgeboard connected to FireWire-1394B HBA (PCI-X).
3. Plextor PX-716SA SATA connected to Promise SATAII-150 TX4 HBA (PCI-X).
Which of these three alternatives would you recommend?

Questions:

1. How many drives would StarBurn SDK support when writing simultaneously?
I know this is a hypothetical question and I'm not asking for any guarantees. But if you would take a calculated guess based on your experience, how many drives do you think would this system be able to write to simultaneously if for example I wanted to write DVD-R discs at 4X ?

2. Would I simply create multiple instances (using CdvdBurnerGrabber_Create) and execute each one at the same time to accomplish simultaneous writing?

3. Is StarBurn SDK multi-threaded? Does the StarBurn SDK create a separate thread for each CdvdBurnerGrabber instance?
If not, is CdvdBurnerGrabber thread-safe? Could I create separate threads, each with it's own CdvdBurnerGrabber instance and have them execute simultaneously?

4. Assuming the answer to question 2 is: "Yes", this would mean that each instance of CdvdBurnerGrabber would get it's own caching buffer, so writing to each drive would be in asynchroneous mode. This requires a lot of PC horesepower.
Is it possible somehow to have the StarBurn SDK write to multiple drives simultaneously in Synchroneous mode where each instance of CdvdBurnerGrabber would use a single common caching buffer? Or better still, use a single instance of CdvdBurnerGrabber and have it write to multiple drives simultaneously?
(in this option if one drive can't keep up and falls behind the other drives would have to wait for the drive to catch up before continuing but this isn't a problem.)

Thank you very much in advance for any information you can give me!

Regards,
Aspegic

We don't have any limitations upon number of devices burning. Just create as many insteansec of CdvdBurnerGrabber as you need. And provide them with the individual FileTree object for recording (even if they all reference to the same ISO image on the hard disk). StarBurn is fully anync/multithreaded. You don't need to perform any extra actions to provide proper handling.

Make sure you 1) have enough of RAM for cache memory (cache is individual per burner) 2) disk I/O is fast enough to handle multiple streams of data from hard disk -> every single burner. 16X DVD burning uses 20MB/sec of sustained transer rate and you need to have pretty fast disk subsystem to handle even 2 or 3 DVD burning sessions at the same time.

We have some customers who use StarBurn in automated environments to parallel DVD recording. So 16-8X DVD burning with up to 4 sessions at the same time is not a problem absolutely.

So asynchroneous writing is the only mode supported. I guess I'll have to upgrade to 8GB RAM and load the entire ISO in memory before burning.
I need to be able to write to 12 drives simultaneously at 4X so reading from harddisk would be to slow (even for a fast ultra-320 scsi harddisk). I hope this is going to work. Everything else about this SDK looks very promising.

Thank you for your reply!

You don't need THAT much RAM. 128-256MB per single physical burner is definitely OK.