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What Makes a Good CD/DVD Duplicator?

Posted by Cliff on from the life-extension-by-cloning dept.

zachjb asks: "With all of the recent articles and buzz in the technology community regarding recordable/pressed optical disks being an unreliable medium to backup your data on, I figured the best way to keep my data alive is to duplicate my CDs/DVDs every few years. I've searched Froogle for CD/DVD duplicators, but I have no idea what I should be looking for. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have a lot experience with this type of equipment? Is this a reasonable solution to the problem or is there a more cost effective one?"

4 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Just toss another drive into your PC... by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Informative

    For casual use, the best CD-R duplicator out there is most likely to throw a cheap no-name CD-ROM drive into your computer next to your favorite burner. If you have a DVR-ROM drive next to your CD burner, you're also all set. It's just about as good as it gets for 1-to-1 copying.

    There are some standalone devices that live to do nothing more than copy... but with prices Checking in at close to $400 you might as well buy a Sub-$500 PC that has both a reader and a burner right out of the box if you're too lazy to build one from the parts yourself. Afterall, for the extra $100 you get a functional PC instead of the one-trick pony of a device that consists of nothing more than a reader and writer with firmware in between.

    If you're publishing content on CDs, then you might be able to justify the cost of getting a one-to-many CD copier device... but think carefully about how often you're actually going to use it before taking the dive. It may be cheaper and easier to just outsource the project to a fulfillment house that does that kind of thing for a living. However, for this particular question's situation of making a one-to-one digital copy every few years to restart the aging clock, having one-to-many capability just isn't going to help much.

    1. Re:Just toss another drive into your PC... by pla · · Score: 4, Informative

      Copying from one drive to another on the fly like this can introduce lots of tiny errors. They're not that noticable, but the preferred method of getting an exact copy is to use something like EAC to extract to the hard drive first, then burn to CD.

      Umm... Sorry, no.

      Although errors can theoretically occur, for the PC to not catch it, you'd need an enormous amount of corruption over a small area, that produces reproduceable false reads, with the correct CRC. Not bloody likely.

      Now, if you refer to either subchannel data, or to physical disk features (such as "hard" bad sectors), sure, a number of imaging programs will work better than a 1:1 copy. But that doesn't really apply to audio data, only to various copy protection mechanisms.

      As something of an aside, making disc images does have advantages, even though the ones you suggest seem a tad irrelevant. For most driver disks, before I even install the hardware, I make an image of the install disc. It goes to my fileserver, and if I ever need to reinstall, I find it takes me less time to burn the ISO than it does to find the original disc. And, if something happens (ie, the dog eats the original), not a problem; a $0.25 disc and 4 minutes later, and I've replaced it.

    2. Re:Just toss another drive into your PC... by cbreaker · · Score: 4, Informative

      Daemon Tools is indespensible. I got my work to convert the large software library to cd images, that you can mount with daemon tools. Not to mention, we use a lot of Vmware stuff, and mounting ISO's on VMware is so easy and fast.

      It wasn't a hard sell. "Get three 250GB IDE Drives, raid them, and put the entire CD library on fault tolerant space for less then $600 and never worry about a lost CD again, and have the entire library available anywhere in the world."

      --
      - It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
  2. Plextor by Yoweigh116 · · Score: 5, Informative

    For a good few years I've stuck with Plextor products for my CD-R/RW drives. They've been dependable and I've never had a problem with them. I have an old 12x SCSI burner in one of my systems that hasn't made a single hiccup in 4 years. I don't think it's made a single coaster, and that was before they had buffer underrun protection. Their DVD burners are most likely just as good, if that's your cup up fea. I highly recommend them. -Yoweigh