Writing to several drives at the same time?

[SEMA]

It would be nice if ImgBurn could write the same data to 2 discs in 2 drives at the same time.

 

After all DVD-R's are quite cheap, and not exactly the most reliable storage medium around, so i always burn 2 copies (on 2 different makes of media) of anything remotely important. I currently use Nero, but my drives don't write at exactly the same speed, and Nero's absurd 80 Megabyte write buffer limit often proves too low, ImgBurn seems to have a 256 Megabyte limit? Which is an improvement even if it's still very much too low for a 2 Gigabyte computer.

[chewy]

You just thrash a single hard drive to death trying to read the same set of files twice doing a simultaneous burn

 

It would be nice if the whole burn could be read into ram and done from there

[SEMA]

No, data should be read only once into the RAM buffer, and then passed from the buffer to 2 different recorders at the same time. This will work just fine if the recorders are closely matched in speed, or the buffer is large enough, a 1.5 Gigabyte buffer should be no problem on a 2 Gigabyte computer with just a few programs open.

[chewy]

data should be read only once into the RAM buffer

 

 

evidently that's not how it works even with nero and matched burners

[SEMA]

evidently that's not how it works even with nero and matched burners

 

Evidently that IS how it works, once the Read position counter (in Nero) for one of the drives reaches 100% the drives internal buffer empties and Burnproof kicks in, clearly indicating that one of the drives have gotten more than 80 Megabytes ahead of the other. Also the "IO bytes read" column on the "Processes" tab of the TaskManager clearly indicates that Nero has only read the source once. The idea is fine, it's just that Nero is a piece of junk, and 80 Megabytes of buffer is insufficient for my 2 drives.

 

You just thrash a single hard drive to death trying to read the same set of files twice doing a simultaneous burn

Actually that's unlikely, The slowest drive would just get the files from the system cache, which unlike Nero doesn't have a 80 Megabyte limit.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

It should indeed just be reading from a single buffer, that's the whole point of it. I doubt I'll be implementing parallel burning within ImgBurn any time soon. Stick with the bigger apps for that.

 

Running multiple instances (of ImgBurn) is a bad idea but it does work for some people. HDD thrashing is inevitable though.

 

If you really must burn to 2 drives at once, why not get 2 drives that are the same make/model? That's what the feature is designed for.