Best way to make own DVD tower?

[PhreePhly]

I am contemplating making a DVD duplication tower. I video tape my son's football and baseball games every year and make a Highlights DVD that I pass out to all of the team member at the award banquet. The problem is that for the football season, this can be up to 60 DVDs if I include the coaches. If 16X SCSI DVD burners were available, this would be simple, but given the IDE bus limitations, I'm not sure what is the best way to do this. I'm thinking a 3 or 4 drive tower would be fine.

PhreePhly

[dodecahedron]

use FireWire and FireWire adapters for the drives ?

[Ian]

use FireWire and FireWire adapters for the drives ?

I was going to suggest the same thing.

[dolphinius_rex]

and don't use different drives at the same time. If possible, buy the drives all at the same time, and make sure they all run the same firmware. You don't want anything mismatched any more then it has to be.

[RJW]

Just to make me sound even more stupid.
A few weeks ago I needed to make quite some copies of experimental data.
So I just hooked up the 3 different burners that I have and do work.
And it did work. No big quality difference when burned with one single drive I spotted. LIke allways Plextor 24/10/40A burned a little bit better as the Pioneer 106D and the Lite On 52327S on the Taiyo Yuden media.
THis shows that you might not need all the same drives if you allready got a lot of different stuff available.

[seanc]

you need to get a tower capable of holding all of your drives (about $100...try brand name: ma power).

then you need the dvd controller. Acard sells one, I have an account with them and can sell you one...or you can go to ebay and buy one.

Here's one example (not related to me, buy at your own risk)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 16342&rd=1

Then buy nec or pioneer drives (that's what A Card has said is the most compatible with their setups).

So you have:

Tower $125
Drives (7 at 65) $455
Controller card $200

$780 to build a 1:7 dvd copier.


Sean

[dolphinius_rex]

Just to make me sound even more stupid.
A few weeks ago I needed to make quite some copies of experimental data.
So I just hooked up the 3 different burners that I have and do work.
And it did work. No big quality difference when burned with one single drive I spotted. LIke allways Plextor 24/10/40A burned a little bit better as the Pioneer 106D and the Lite On 52327S on the Taiyo Yuden media.
THis shows that you might not need all the same drives if you allready got a lot of different stuff available.

Yup, on CD-Rs that'll work a lot better... but I'm guessing you weren't burning DVDRs with your LiteON 52327S and Plextor 24/10/40A

The problem comes in with the drives slowing down and starting up again to try to keep the speeds at a somewhat constant between all the drives. Using different drives you'll get lot's of "buffer underrun" gaps/connections, which is something you generally want to avoid if possible.

[dolphinius_rex]

you need to get a tower capable of holding all of your drives (about $100...try brand name: ma power).

CM Stacker's are also nice, but more expensive (but VERY nicely crafted!)

then you need the dvd controller. Acard sells one, I have an account with them and can sell you one...or you can go to ebay and buy one.

Here's one example (not related to me, buy at your own risk)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 16342&rd=1

Haven't heard much about ACard personally. I would suggest going with a controller where the manufacturer has a reputation for actually bringing out firmware updates, preferably one that can actually allow you to update the DRIVES' firmware without removing them from the tower and hooking them up to a PC. It's not as important for CD burning, but for DVD burning it's very important if you plan on using the duplicator for more then a year. (or even 6months!)

Then buy nec or pioneer drives (that's what A Card has said is the most compatible with their setups).

So you have:

Tower $125
Drives (7 at 65) $455
Controller card $200

$780 to build a 1:7 dvd copier.

Technically, that would be a 1:6 DVD copier

[seanc]

all the controllers I've seen look very similar. Could you pass along another dvd copy controller and where to find it? I have wished acard would come out with firmware sooner, and the ability to update the drives firmware would easily would be very welcomed...

Sean

[dolphinius_rex]

all the controllers I've seen look very similar. Could you pass along another dvd copy controller and where to find it? I have wished acard would come out with firmware sooner, and the ability to update the drives firmware would easily would be very welcomed...

Sean

I can try... It's not really my area, but I can look into it for you. I do work with people who do a lot with copier towers, so getting opinions on brand names shouldn't be *too* hard

[PhreePhly]

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone.

seanc, I take it then that the tower is standalone. One drive holds the master disk and the other 6 burn the data from it? I had not thought of that. I was going to just build a bare bone PC with Nero to send the image to multiple drives.

dolphinius_rex, could you post some more info about other controller cards. Frankly 1:7 is more than I need. I was thinking more along the lines of 1:3.

Thanks,
PhreePhly

[seanc]

to give you an idea of what they look like:




no affiliation with the company mentioned above...just the first picture I found. Very handy and works much better than a pc with multiple drives in my opinion.

Sean