Just a follow-up to suggestions made above to test write speeds:
I tried burning multiple discs sequentially with ImgBurn, then burning concurrently with Nero. ImgBurn took 8 minutes to burn two discs, Nero took 3 minutes. These are stopwatch times, not the times displayed by the program (which matched perfectly in both cases anyway). I did not try the "multiple instances of ImgBurn" suggestion because that seems kludgy at best.
Most important to note is that I'm not running quad-core or anything fancy. It's a 4-year-old P4 system with a rather pokey WD 500GB HDD and 1GB of RAM. I've been doing it this way for years and Nero works just fine writing up to 4 DVDs simultaneously (even when two of the drives are external USB drives). I have no issues with coasters or CPU degradation or anything. Writing 4 discs at the same time does take longer than writing 2 discs, but nowhere near twice as long. There are big time savings to be had, and no real downside. In fact, I'm burning to multiple discs right now as I write this.
Without any disrespect intended to any comments above, CPU and HDD speeds should not have any bearing on writing to multiple drives simultaneously. Even the slowest modern systems will be able to provide data faster than is needed to perform the write (at least up to 12X, which is what I'm using). What really matters is the caching and memory management strategies employed by the burning software.
I came to ImgBurn because I'm tired of Nero's devolution. ImgBurn is certainly a Nero-killer for most burn-related tasks, but it definitely has a blind spot on multiple drives. Nero has rapidly become bloated junkware, but I guess I'll keep it around just for this one capability...
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