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Creating The Ultimate CD-Burning Machine?
Joe Schwendt asks: "Since CD Burners have become so cheap, almost everyone has one. But there are still problems associated with them, especially the faster ones (8X or 12X). It pretty much ties up your machine during the burning process, otherwise you run the risk of creating yet another coaster. If you were going to create a dedicated CD Burning machine on a network with higher speed burners, what would that be? Is a 486 enough? How much RAM? IDE or SCSI? Is Linux the ideal burning platform, or do we still have to use something from the dark side of the force (stripped down Windows95/98/NT/2000 install)? What about burning applications? "
is that why you are user 12,XXX?
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Remember, everyone was a newbie once. It's a tired old line, but it bears repeating.
I tend to tell folks to RTFM as well, but I do try to remember that even if we have been around for all the questions, it doesn't hurt to give the answer out one more time.
An old-timer who doesn't sympathize with your view. But I respect that you can have it. :)
Doesn't even need to be that much. I used to burn CDs on my P75 wihout problems. I'd get occasional buffer underruns when doing other stuff at the same time, but since this is going to be a dedicated burning machine, you're not going to have much else happening anyway. Also, it was an older generation burner with a small (512K, IIRC) cache. Newer drives have 2MB and above, which should be more than enough. If you're using cdrecord, you get an additional software buffer, too, so buffer underruns are virtually unheard of.
Of course, SCSI goes without saying. You don't need anything great -- a cheap $50 card will be fine. Be prepared to pay slightly more for a SCSI burner, but if you shop around, it should only be an extra 10% or so. I even managed to find my Yamaha 4416S for less than IDE version.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Think SCSI - everywhere. The key to CD burning is to keep CPU usage low, low low. Disk usage can actually be pretty high, since you're only pulling about 600-1200kbps off a disk, which is a fraction of the MTR for most modern disks. But as soon as processes start pulling away CPU time, your buffer can underrun. Obviously, this means using SCSI, which has way lower CPU usage than ATAPI. You don't need a real beefy CPU for burning - my P2-233/PlexWriter SCSI worked fine for years - just don't go doing other things. Having gobs of RAM isn't necessarily important either, although it can help reduce disk swapping. My advice would be to get an old Pentium 2 or even a high end P1 and a fast SCSI controller and hard disk.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Two years ago would be May of 1998. I've only been here since October of 1998 and my user # is less than half what yours is. Too bad you aren't as good with a calendar as you are with a computer :-)
But seriously, the Slashdot crowd is a lot of people from a wide variety of bakgrounds so there are probably a lot of them who are learning something from this discussion, and many of them probably consider the discussions where you learn something to be remedial from their point of view.
When you have something for everyone, everything isn't going to be to the tastes of the one.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
SCSI is the only way to go when it comes to the drive interface; no IDE can touch SCSI in CPU utilisation unless you do something stupid like use an ISA SCSI card.
It really depends on what you want to burn; if your software lets you make image files, and you only want to burn one CD at a time, any computer will do. If you want to burn over the network, burn lots of tiny files, and so on, you'll need a faster computer all around and software that buffers a lot.
I've tried two 4x SCSI CD burners on my Amiga 1200 - burned two separate CDs from two different sets of data at the same time. I was still able to browse and run other software without noticeable slowdown, as my SCSI is DMA and my CD software (MakeCD) can let me set large buffers.
This is a different issue than if you want to burn several CDs simultaneously from the same source; lots of generic software lets you do that, but not many let you burn different CDs from different data.
In end, do you want to do it live over a 10-base-T network? Faster computer. 100-base-TX? Not as important. Make an image file first, then burn it? Speed is irrelevant.
BTW - who ever said that the machine is tied up while burning? You're not running a multitasking OS? I thought this was the year 2000...
DISCLAIMER? I have a dual Celeron 400 box w/ 128MB of RAM - a sweet IBM Ultra2 Wide LVD hard drive and a SCSI Plextor PlexWriter 8/20.
Anyhow, I run RC5 24/7, always with enough apps open to use all of my physical RAM (Navigator, xemacs, WordPerfect, XFMail, x11amp, bash, etc.). I don't ever close anything down, or use the computer less while burning (hell, I think I was even compiling something while burning once), and have yet to make a coaster.
Maybe it's the dual processors - who knows, but I don't think this is even an issue on newer machines. Maybe with some older PIIs you run the risk of making duds, I don't know...
Besides, how often do you really burn something? Are you burning CDs twice a day, or something? Why would you need a dedicated machine for burning?
I've been using a Mitsumi CR-4801TE (4x write, 8x read) with Linux for about two years. The only bad burns I've had have been when I've been attempting to copy 'tricky' stuff to see how difficult it was. I've come to the conclusion that having a CDR drive that can do DAO and using a /good/ CDROM drive (mine is cheap n' nasty) are about the most important factors.
Under Linux, the ide-scsi pseudo driver works just fine. I use cdrecord to write, mkisofs to create the images and gcombust if I'm feeling lazy and want a nice GUI (see freshmeat for all of these apps).
I don't know what's so great about CD Creator. I have used a computer (not one of mine) with an HP CD-RW drive, a P200, and windoze95. The user interface is a bit odd, and it had frequent buffer underruns. However, it doesn't even let you know something's wrong until it's too late.
;-)
Then I took that same CD-RW and put it in my P75 with SuSE linux. mkisofs+cdrecord is powerful, and works on a text-only telnet connection. I've never had a buffer underrun because cdrecord lets you know the status of the fifo so you can kill other processes if the fifo starts emptying. And it has no trouble streaming data from an NFS server, through mkisofs, and into cdrecord.
Games? Quake 2 works great in linux!
Just my $0.02 US.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
My personal experience is that a 486dx2-66 with 16 megs of ram work fine for burning CD's at x2 (on IDE, even). My CD machine just has a stripped down Win98 install and two 800MB partitions for making images. I use VNC to start the process and then I just don't touch it. The reason I use Win98 (I have used linux to burn CD's before) is due to the software. Right now I mainly use CDR-Win because it works well and it uses a common image format. Burning at higher speeds may require a faster machine.
fnord
I tried bending CDs for use as handy and decentlooking CDholders. I gave up, I'm going back to vinyl. As for burning CDs quickly: I can really recommend an oldfashioned stove, preferably one running on coal. It can handle burning CDs by the dozens, and a microwave can't reach the temperature of burning coal. It is also stable, with uptimes known to be over 2 months. where a microwave needs to power down after each burning session, one can easily burn session after session in a stove without a single powerdown. And ofcourse there is the fact that you can quickly and easily, again without rebooting, add CDs to a burning session in progress.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
First, if you're building a machine just to burn discs you're going to want to make sure you're using 100baseT, and even then realize it'll take a few minutes to transfer 650mb of data between machines. On one hand, it's great to have a separate machine, but on the other it can be a bit of a drag. Anyway, if you use a 486, make sure you've got a 100 card that'll work with it... out of my pile of 486s only a few have PCI, and I haven't seen many great deals on 100 ISA cards.
IDE v. SCSI -- well, the snobs will berate you if you go with IDE. Now, SCSI is great, and I love my SCSI Plextors. I do all sorts of things on my SCSI NT box at my office while burning discs, and seriously, I can't remember the last time I got a coaster. The newish IDE Plextor drives look real cool, though, and you can get 'em for about $230 last time I checked... if it's a dedicated burning machine, IDE will probably work just fine for you. Get yourself a bigass IDE hard drive for stockpiling stuff until it's time to burn. And you won't go wrong with Plextor, whether it's IDE or SCSI.
So if I was you, I'd get a Pentium-class machine with a decent 10/100 card and 32mb of RAM, 64 if you have it laying around. Throw Win95 OSR2 on it with Adaptec CD Creator 3.5b (but not that DirectCD stuff) if it supports your drive; if not, be sure to grab the most recent CD Creator patch, as the 4.0 series seems to have issues (I've happily stuck with 3.5b, so I don't know the details). IDE or SCSI, you should have a decent burning box. For trickier burns, check out CDRWin and Nero, and Sonic Foundry's CD Architect program is brilliant for making audio CDs.
I'd love it if there's software for Linux comparable to CD Creator, CDRWin and CD Architect... these three programs are, besides games, of course, the best reasons I can think of for keeping an MS operating system around.
And use good quality blanks - your mileage WILL vary, so sample and test a bunch of brands with your hardware before settling on one. Personally, I'm partial to Mitsui, but I've used Verbatim blues quite a bit as well.
Good luck!
Through extensive research with many NT CDs I have discovered that the best machine for burning cds is... a microwave. It can burn a single cd every 60 second or so Although after a few dozen runs it has to be replaced, the smell becomes intorable.
I know that this will be moderated down, butWhat the fuck kind of question is this? This is easy!
/. questions. especially the one awhile ago about "real time math processing," by which they meant games, and for which there were readily available answers.
/. questions.
Adaptec toast is probably the best burning s/w out there. That would mean that you want Mac or PC -
not like it matters anyway, because there's good software for every platform.
I assume that you want this to be economical. Well, duh, get the minimum requirements for your piece of software, plus whatever extra you can afford or want to spend.
cluestick: the more ram and speed you have, the faster it will go. the faster your drive, the faster it will go.
so, you OBVIOUSLY want to have SCSI because it is the best I/O scheme available.
i am getting tired of the rediculous ask
I move for a vote of no confidence in whoever screens the ask
No comment at this time
hmmm... i think i smell a good answer to a stupid ask slashdot question! :)
here's an interesting idea for a poll - what to people do with garbage (AOL) CDs? i use them for coasters, microwave testers, things to throw at Spaz, and garbage?
anybody else?
No comment at this time
I don't know if it's the machine being too slow to handle the conversion overhead, but if I stick to 2x or if I make images before burning, it works better.
As far as software, I have had much better luck using Linux's set of tools than with any windows software. The Linux software is scriptable too, which is more convenient.
I've got a PII300mhz, 128mb RAM, 7.5gb IDE 7200rpm drive. And a Adaptec 2940 PCI SCSI Card, and a HP 9210i 8x4x32x CDRW drive. I can do almost anything in Linux while I burn, xmms, Netscape, compiling short stuff is as risky as I get (I won't push it and run Q3:). But windows I don't trust.. I let the system alone for 9min for a burn. It's just to unstable to do much of anything while burning. Same goes for NT 4, and a BIG one for W2k, you can crash the system with a direct floppy access :)
At work, we have an entire wall of the main office that's covered with dead motherboards, dead modems, dissected hard drives, 5 1/4" floppies, ancient RAM, archaic mice, miscellaneous unidentifiable cables and the like. Every month some online service or another, usually AOL, sends us CD's, presumably to dole out to customers. The CD's go onto the wall. That's also where some of our coasters from burns gone bad go. There's also a fairly intricate mobile of AOL CD's hanging in the back office. It's kind of interesting. We've got a few leopard-spotted ones, a few "Titanium" ones, and some others I don't remember right off the top of my head (if I were posting from work, I'd be able to duck my head out my door to peek). The whole setup looks surprisingly festive.
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
I think the best way to do it is a network appliance. Linksys has a device which is basicly a 20GB hard drive and a network card... cheap net storage. Modify this a bit, add a CD-R drive, possibly an autoloader, maybe add a cheap printing thing that prints labels and applies them to the CD, and presto. The source computer transfers the entire CD to the device's drive, which gets checked, burned, and labeled. If done right it could be cheap!
--IronHelix