Adding Multiple Bluray Writers to my PC
I would like to be able to burn at least 4 Bluray discs at once from 4 different ISO images on my USB 3.0 hard drive but I'm not sure of the best way to go about it.
Just wondering what is the maximum number of drives I could use at the same time to burn at full 4x speed?
Should I just buy a larger PC case and some extra cables to fit the internal drives (what cables would I need?).
Would I be better off using the following:
- Internal Drives
- eSATA to external non-USB 3.0 drives in encosures with own power supply? I don't really know anything about doing this.
- USB Drives. Would I need USB 2.0 or 3.0 drives?
Is eSATA the same speed as USB 3.0?
Could you please suggest some scan products I could buy for any of the above methods.
Re: Adding Multiple Bluray Writers to my PC
Re: Adding Multiple Bluray Writers to my PC
Some writer software may allow you to run multiple instances, so then you would just select a different drive to write to each time. Failing that you might be able to run multiple virtual machines to enable you to launch several instances of the writer software. Failing that it might be simpler to build four small computers each with one writer and access to shared storage.
In the first two cases you want fast I/O to make sure you don't bottleneck, so you would want Sata 2 or eSata connected hard drives. USB 3 might be OK, but I'd stick with SATA where you can as it's more robust. Sata 2 is more than fast enough for mechanical drives, and you are likely to have more Sata 2 ports on a motherboard (enough for a few big hard drives and the four writers). You also want plenty of ram, cores and possibly an architecture that plays nicely with virtualisation, though I think most do these days.
In the latter case each PC wouldn't need to be anything like as powerful, and blu-ray writing speed will be much slower than a decent network connection, however you still probably want to cache on a small local drive to help. It might be most cost effective to build one medium machine to act as the storage server and then have three cheap satellite machines.
