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I have been waiting for a truly awsome DVD Burner to use as a back-up appliance on a three PC Peer-to-Peer network, Windows 2000 & Windows XP Pro. (As well as for other DVD applications.)

Can I successfully use the DRU-500 as a shared drive on the network and use it as a system back-up device using Stomp "BackUp My PC"?

If so, my next challange would be how I can install it on the network's master PC, a Dell Precsion 340. The master PC has two harddrives on the first IDE adapter and would have the DRU-500 and a TDK 24x10x49B on the second IDE apapter. If that would work, which should be the master?

My alternative is to continue to wait for a unit not unlike the DRU-500 with an IEEE 1934(Fire Wire) interface.

Can you give me some guidance with this installtion and/or alternatives?

Thank you

Richard Heaton

I know that DiskJuggler 4 has a way to share a drive over a LAN. Their website is http://www.padus.com/ .

Hope this helps.

I don't know about sharing a firewire device between computers, but you can buy the
DRU500 now, and put it in your own firewire enclosure. That is what I did.

As for network based backups, I did just burn a DVD from a .iso file across the network to
the DRU500. (I actually used dvd decrypter for the burn, as nero locked up trying to open the .iso).
I wouldn't recommend this as a general solution unless you know that your LAN won't
congest with other traffic.

I think what he is asking is some way of having the drive installed on one machine and have the others be able to control and burn to it as if it were installed locally. DiskJuggler4 does this.

as for buring across a network, I do it all the time and have done it for years. I have an AMD 900MHz with 768MB RAM running WinXP SP1 as a "file server" (basically this means a WinXp machine with about 300GB+). I use my AMD 1.3MHz with 512MB PC2100 RAM running WinXP SP1 to burn data on a CD with my LiteOn 48X CDRW and to my Sony DRU-500A to make DVD-Rs. one thing you may want to do before doing this is to set BOTH NICs to 100MB full duplex and make sure you are connecting to a switch that is capable of doing 100MB full duplex (a switch will give better through put compaired to a hub). if you are only connecting 2 machines and do not have a router for broadband internet access, you can just use a CAT5 crossover cable and connect both NICs. You will have to assign an IP address for both machines (example is make one 192.168.1.1 and the other 192.168.1.2) I do have trouble burning at 48X, but 32X-40X is usually fine.

as bac noted, this will put a heavy load on your network. about 97% of the time I am the only one on the netowrk at home so it doesn't matter how much load there is on the network. I am always able to browse the internet and do whatever I want to on the machine I am burning to or my laptop.

one thing you can do to see how much of a load the burn is placing on the "server" or machine burning from, is to open the task manager. there is a tab for network traffic. click on that tab and it will show how much bandwidth is getting eaten up while burning. I have all 3Com 3C905C NICs running to a Linksys router/switch and the most the server gets to is 40% burning on the other machine at 40X.

if you really have $$$ to burn, get a GigaBit switch with all 1000MB ports and some 1000baseT NICs for all machines.

mike_s104 wrote:I think what he is asking is some way of having the drive installed on one machine and have the others be able to control and burn to it as if it were installed locally. DiskJuggler4 does this.

Yes, ideally. But I thought the firewire comment was an allusion to making the drive
multi-access - plugged into multiple firewire hosts simultaneously.

as a side question, how do I quote someone like I was about 2 posts ago?

anyway, I think we both read the post differently. I can see what you read now. I read that part as he was going to use the firewire drive on different machines. and to do so, he was going to plug it in as needed on the machine requiring it.

mike_s104 wrote:as a side question, how do I quote someone like I was about 2 posts ago?

Press the "quote" button in the upper right corner of the post you wish to quote. You can also manually insert quotes anywhere by pressing the "Quote" button on the posting window (fourth button from the left) or by manually typing as displayed in the following code block (I can't figure out how to escape the quote syntax, so I put it in a code block ):

Code: Select all

[quote="name of person being quoted"]quoted material[/quote]


cfitz

<edit>left, right, I can't tell the difference... </edit>

To quote a message, just hit the quote button at the top right hand corner of the
message you want to quote. This will automatically put their text in your reply body.
You can then edit out the extraneous sections from the auto-generated quote.

thanks guys. I never saw that button there

Thanks everyone for your responses to my question. My main goal is to install the DRU-500 as an IDE drive on one of the three networked PC's and then have all three PC use the 500 to burn system back-ups using the Backup Exec software installed on each machine. I'll look into DiskJuggler 4 as a software solution in using the networked DVD burner.

This activity can be done after business hours so the network, 100mp ethernet, using a switch and DSL router for internet access, will be inactive during the back-up activities.

The firewire alernative would allow me to take the DVD burner from machine to machine and burn the back-ups on each machine independly.

Is there apt to be any problems having the 500 and the TDK on the same IDE adapter?

I appreciate your inputs.

Richard Heaton

I wouldn't think so. a CDR or DVDR "should" be the mast on the IDE controller, but that is not always the case. I have my LiteOn 48X CDRW as the secondary master, my DVD-ROM as the secondary slave, my Sony DRU-500A as the primary slave and the HDD as the primary master. I tried the DVD-R as the primary master and the boot HDD on a ATA100 Primise controller, but the machine would freeze every so often. I then moved them to how they are now and everything works fine. I'm just lazy sometimes and since it's working fine like it is, I'm not going to mess with it.

actually, I have never had a problem running a CDR as a slave but I know it can cause problems for some.

as for having a CDR and the DRU-500a, no, there should not be a problem. I would suggest putting one on the primary controller and the other on the secondary.

BTW, DiskJuggler can be bought to support burning to multiple drives at the same time (copy one CD to two CDRs at the same time).