What Makes a Good CD/DVD Duplicator?

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?"

Comments

Sounds like a job for RAID...

[LostCluster]

Personally, I think the best long term storage for a Slashdot reader would to be to build a home RAID server. Hard drives fail, but they rarely fail all at once. That's why a designed-for-redundancy RAID is perfect for this situation.

You don't really need to be concerned about hot-swapping, because you can afford your pictures being unavailable for the hour or so while you're swapping out a failed HD every few years.

Re:Sounds like a job for RAID...

[GigsVT]

RAID != backup though.

Malicious programs, accidental rm -rf... filesystem corruption.. bugs..

Set up some rsync backups for your data to multiple separate systems, with at least one offsite.

You can do rsync-incremental backups too if you want a really good backup solution. Rdiff -backup uses similar ideas too, but the simlipcity of rsync-incrementals can't be beat.

New Concept.

[texatut]

"but I have no idea what I should be looking for."

A printer.

Store it on a hard drive!

[rice_burners_suck]

I suppose the best thing to do, with constantly reducing prices for hard drives, is to build a RAID machine with about a terabyte of space available and store all the movies there. Then, they can be served to devices around your house.

In fact, I think a set-top style box (though still a rather big one, at least now) could be built to do exactly what consumers need. And with increasing Internet bandwidths, it would be really cool if you could buy a movie with your remote control and have it delivered and stored on your system at home. If only the big few could get past their DRM-inducing fears and offer a reasonable way for consumers to do this. I believe that if this were offered with music, back when the whole Napster thing started, downloading stuff for free might have been a fringe weird geek sort of activity, because most reasonable people would have an easy way to get perfect recordings every time for a small payment. Hopefully the movie industry won't be so blind to this gaping wide business opportunity as to cause themselves the same problem, and eventually ruin technology for everyone by making it decide what we are and aren't allowed to do.

Depends

[bluGill]

Too many variables. Some can print the CD after burning it. (Print the CD, not apply a label which is a bad idea) Some are completely automated, just stick a stack in, hit run, and come back latter to a stack of burned CDs. Some are faster than others.

If your quantities are large enough you will find that pressing the disks just like the big music guys to is cheapest. Unless you are really really big this is an outsourced operation. Even if pressing doesn't make sense, it might make sense to outsource to someone who can do it for you.

For dirt cheap it is hard to beat turning an old PC with a burner into your station.

Start by defining your needs. Do you need labels? How many do you need, over what time period? How often are you likely to change what is on the CD? How cheap is labor in your area? How much human attention can you afford to give each burn? What will you be doing after the burn is done?

The answers will define what you need in a solution. They may even define the divide between burning in house and outsourcing.

Plextor

[Yoweigh116]

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

Piracy and Legitimacy

[TechnoFreek]

I work for a business that duplicates CDs and DVDs. We have a bunch of autloading/burning/printing machines from companies like Primera. We can burn around 1500-2000 CDs daily. Mostly for places like banks or H&R Block. Anyways, www.primera.com has autoloaders and such available for purchase. Those machines work pretty well, although they take up quite a bit of the windows resources at work. I think they have mac compatible machines, but haven't checked in a while.

Build a Terabyte Array!

[FsG]

If you're going to be investing large amounts of money into a good CD/DVD duplicator, why not consider building a RAID 5+0 terabyte server instead? For $1600, it makes for an excellent backup solution; the array is fault-tolerant so even in the unlikely event that a hard drive fails, you lose nothing. Throw in a gigabit ethernet card, and you'll be able to quickly & easily copy things on and off the server.

IMHO, it beats the pants off re-burning a huge stack of CD's every year, while praying that none of them turned out to have a lifetime of 364 days.