HI
Can anyone tell me what the data rate coming off the hard drive needs to be to write DVD at 4x and again at 8x.

If 4 burners are writing at the same time does this mean you times that figure by 4 or is there extra overhead added that needs to be taken into account.

I want to feed 4 burners form a single drive. Want to make sure that the drive is fast enough to stream the data fast enough.

Thinking raptors stripped as level 0 and a seperate firewire port to each of the burners.

anybody have suggestions or better ways to do this ?

Thanks in Advance


Regards

Mark

Source :

2x = 2770KB/s

So ..

4x = 5540KB/s
8x = 11080KB/s

It also depends what kind of DVD format you're writing on them.

"True" firewire is around 400MB/s so that should be no problem.

Hi Mr Beleverdere

Thanks for your response.

When you say "true" firwire , what do you mean. I am planning on getting a fire 800 7 port card. I am not sure if firewire 800 is an oxford 911 chip or not but afaik 800 is proper firewire. I suspect you may mean the old 1394 standard or perhaps firewire embedded on a mobo ?


Could you clarify


Thanks

mark

If you want to feed 4 burners, this would take about 20MB/sec at 4x according to Mr B's calculations.
More or less any recent harddrive can provide that transfer-rate. However, this isn't always true when it comes to transferring different files at once. The drive needs to acces files on different places on the disk, which could slow things down significantly, especially on fragmented disks. I doubt this is going to be a problem for 20MB/sec (certainly with RAID0 raptors), but at 8x; 40MB/sec from "1" drive (actually 2 in RAID 0), it might be different.

Exactly , there's 1394A and 1394B. I believe Kenshin once wrote a post about purchasing ten of these cards.

//edit//

Ah , this thread

//end of edit//

I think the original question was unclear. If you are burning the same thing to multiple drives simultaneously, there is no increase in demand on the HD.
I've successfully burned at 8x to 2 DVD's from multiple instances of Nero, no problem. But it really does depend on your HD, access times are critical if you're supplying multiple datastreams to multiple drives. This is where HD's like the WD Raptors come in very handy.

Hi Ya

@ Mr Belverdere

1394B = firewire 800 ? I think so but need to do more research. Even firewire 400 is good enough but no use starting with older tech , god knows the newer chipsets will be outdated soon enough.

@ Wannez

thanks for your reply. Understand what your saying but i think raptors in a stripe set should't be a problem, especially the 74's just out. I should think if a pair of 74's striped cant keep up with the demand , nothing will (o.k o.k who's gunna jump up and say 15k scsi's striped will ;-) ...... i wanna spend the cash on writers not overpriced technolgy) i suppose it really will get interesting when we get up to 12x or 16X burning which is just around the corner......


@ rdgrimes

hmm maybe the question could have gone into more detail. What i mean is on a firewire connection each writer will get its own stream of data. I need to make sure i setup a drive fast enough to feed 4 streams. I just want to check to make sure i have't overlooked an extra hidden overhead as well as the basic dat rate . Each writer will be on its own port not daisy chained. My understanding is firewire is the best way to do this. If i were to do it under a IDE setup i would run out of IDE channels with 4 burners and mulitple drives and then the issues of master/slave settings etc what with some writers being pickey about where they are on the IDE channel. Best way to avoid all that is to put each nurner on its own firewire (or scsi) port.

Now if the burners are writing the same project i think they will still need there own data stream ? If each burner is writing a different project then they will definatly get their own stream . Please enlighten me on this as you seem to know what you are talking about. How have you set up your system ? any problems or gotcha's ?

Thanks for you input , i really do value what you all have to say.

Best Regards

Mark

If the drives are burning simultaneously from one program (same data), it's only one data stream. If the drives are not identical and burning with the same strategy, you will see buffer problems on the faster drive(s) because the burning program will only supply the data at one rate.
Of course you can only burn to multiple drives in certain programs.
Burning to separate drives from separate programs, you will most likely hit the "PCI bus wall" before you come close to the firewire limitations. How much your PCI bus can do depends on your system config.

Hi Ya

@rdgrimes

Thanx for clearing that up. I intend to get a Tynan M/B with PCi-X and run dual opertons. Not sure yet how i am going to setup the H/D's hence my post. Been looking for a way to setup multiple writers and it seems firewire covers that angle as mentioned.

As far as i am aware nero burns to multiple writers as does 120 and clone cd , not sure about clone DVD. Just want to avoid under run problems and make sure the drive set up doesn't run out of steam once a burn has commenced.

Cant think of anything else right now but if you had any other points on how to best setup this box , i'd appreciate anything you had to say.

Best Regards

Mark

Nero will only burn to 2 drives max, and only with the retail version. You can however open multiple instances of Nero, as many as you want.