PC for burning multiple BluRay simultaneously

[Srek]

I would go for a current Core 2 Duo or Quad based system and make sure that it has two seperate SATA controllers so you can spread IO load. A striped RAID 0 drive might speed things up for reading. In the end it depends on how fast the BR writers are.
Cheers
Björn

[ninus3d]

Thanks for the reply :)
Okay, so aslong as i manage to spread the load over the channels I should be somewhat in
the clear then.
But the PCI-E bus that I would add external controller to is somewhat limited aswell isnt it?
Do anyone know how much data a BR burner pulls?

[Srek]

Writing BD-Rs at 4x speed would result in about 18 MB/s.

Cheers
Björn

[ninus3d]

A raid 0 solution should easily (well, atleast in theory) be able to feed 4x BR burners then.
Was kinda scared this would be so far from the truth that I didnt bother testing, but i will
buy the necessary equipment to do some clean benches on and update this post for whoever
might need ;) Thanks alot for your help mate :)

Cheers
Morgan

[imashination]

Any low end machine will be able to do this, no need for raid or quad cores. All burning software that supports multiple drives will be burning them in sync and with a buffer, so the drive isnt skipping all over the place reading the same file 4 times. If one drive slows down or has a problem, it will continue trickling data to the other 3 drives until the lagging drive catches or or just fails totally, then the other 3 will continue again at full speed.

If you get a seperate drive to read the iso from and a dual core cpu youll be able to continue using your computer normally. I play WoW while burning on 4 dvd drives at 16x speed (20 megs/sec) so a 4x speed 18meg/sec BR disc shouldnt be any different. This is all using the onboard controllers.

[ninus3d]

Sounds great imashination!
Are there any requirement to get the drive to support beeing synced though?
Do they have to be of the same kind, on the same controller etc etc?

[VeryPC]

Matthew is right, the only thing I am wondering is with all the new copy protection in blu-ray (hdcp and the like), if this is going to change your CPU time whilst burning.

Best bet is to do an experiment, bring up the task manager (performance tab) and compare the CPU usage from burning 1 blu ray disc (at 4x) to 1 DVD (at 20x).

If the CPU usage is higher:
When you design the machine, keep your clock speeds high, an AMD x2 6000, or an intel 3.0GHZ C2D. Also use 800MHz FSB RAM. This should minimise margin for error.

[UrbanFuturistic]

Matthew is right, the only thing I am wondering is with all the new copy protection in blu-ray (hdcp and the like), if this is going to change your CPU time whilst burning.Unlikely. Even if the company is paranoid enough to implement encryption on test discs I would be very surprised if this can't be done to the image prior to burning and HDCP is a one bit on/off switch with the encryption beng implemented by the playback hardware.

[VeryPC]

Unfortunately in the computer industry 'unlikely' is often the case, we call it Murpheys Law.
A simple experiment as suggested will help clarify whether you need faster kit.

[imashination]

Well you will want all drives to be the same model and on the same firmware. Also consider the media. Buying cheap discs can make a massive difference to the failure rate, I recently get a bad batch of discs which are giving me a 50% chance of failure. Check burning forums to see whats flavour of the day.

As for DRM and such, this will almost certainly be handled at the iso compilation stage, the burning process should be a simple dump of data to the disc.

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