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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? "
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.
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.