#1 Burning Software

Hi All,

Last year i was involved in a project that required one pc to burn two different DVD-video discs simultaniously.

Through out the project we experienced an issue with the pc not being able to get the data to the DVD burner drive fast enough, resulting in many failled burns. In the end we had to reduce to write speed to 4x, a data rate that the system could handle.

Alas the history has repeated itself and a similair project has come up.

Does anyone know how I can improve the hardware speed of the hard disk sys sytem to allow me to burn two DVD Video discs at the same time.

I am looking into SATA-II (300MB/s) and also Raid 1 arrays. is this the route to go down.


Also, twhen the old projected closed the DVD, the padding took a long time to complete, would a write speed increase make this process faster?


Thanks All

David

1) Put as much memory as you can and increase write buffer in StarBurn.

2) Put DVD images (or source files) on the different physical hard disks. See, if you have 100MB/sec ATA disk it does not mean two concurrent threads would both do 50+50=100 MB/sec. ABSOLUTELY NO! You would change SEQUENTIAL access mode to RANDOM access mode. So performance would be at say 15-20 MB/sec combined. Not enough even for two 16X DVD burns done at the same time.

3) Make sure system does DMA for ATAPI devices.

4) Avoid broken USB bridges and if possible - repleace USB enclosures with FireWire. They are MUCH more stable.

That's all

Hi Anton,

Thank you for the reply.....the system we are using has 2Gig physical ram, so i'll try and make the StarBurn cache bigger.

Someone from Rocket Division supplied me with a simultanious DVD read speed test program. Do the data rates indicated my this program indeicate the maximum rates that the system can support?

Thanks

David

1) Would help but it's not a 100% working solution. Disk I/O subsystem is still a bottleneck.

2) Yes. At least StarBurn own reads would be pretty close as I/O models is nearly identical.