Is it impossible to set up a tower with 4 or 5 burners and simultaneously burn separate files to each drive? It seems like you would need some kind of controller card, but the only ones out there are built for duplication. I also wonder about RAM issues and processor speeds. Nero supposedly supports simultaneously burns, but what about the hardware side.

That a look at this Link and you will see nothing is impossible.

OK, you've sparked my interest. Nice rack. Feel like sharing.

When you sit down and work out the figures it gets very difficult.

Each burner if burning at 16x needs to be fed with 23MB/s
Each HDD can deliver approx 50MB/s of continuous data, this falls below 25MB/s when more than one stream is needed due to the time it takes to move the heads on the disc.
Each IDE channel can handle at most 100MB/s, most DVD writers are UDMA2 which is only 33MB/s on a good day so only 1 writer per channel.
PCI can only handle 133MB/s so for HDD reading and writing that falls to 66MB/s for each PCI add in card.

Ok, 5 burners will need 5 HDD's to run different images from, that gives a total of 10 IDE devices and to make sure of no problems you will need to run each on its own channel, 4 IDE devices off of the built in controller, leaves 6 to run from PCI IDE cards. Now we hit another problem, PCI will not support all 6 devices running at over 23MB/s as you run out of bandwitdth. 4 would be your limit (2x 23MB for the writers and 2x 23MB for the HDD's givining 92MB/s of PCI data which is very close to its burst limit).

Basically, the most you will get on a standard 33MHz 32 bit PCI based PC is 4 writers and 4 HDD's all bruning 16x at once. This is using the onboard IDE channels if they DONT use PCI for connection to the CPU (like most dont now)