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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.
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.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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.
=P
Free music from Jack Merlot.
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."