How to burn cds onto multiple burners on networked computers

Well doing the process over the network is something I have not seen.  However multiple burners in a single machine and using something like Nero Burning Rom, would copy to multiple drives at one time.  I have not seen a program that will do it over the network, and to be completely honest, i dont think it is REally that feasible, let alone time saving...it may save some time, but you still have to Insert the blank media in the appropriate drive, and of course remove the burned media when done etc.  2ndly, multiple machines accessing the SAME data accross the network depending on how many machines you have may not work well or work right due to speed of the machine that you grab the data from, and the hard drive or cdrom that the data is on.  thirdly bandwith problems, if for some reason the bandwith on the network gets iced up and the data is not continously flowing and you dont have current CD burners with buffer underrun (or similar technologies) you may burn coasters or bad cd's if you will...

fourthly, if the drives are different per machine, and say you did have a piece of software that would multiburn accross the network and your hardware is sufficent to transfer the info accross the networks, your burn speed would probably have to be set to the drive that is the slowest on the system.  Ie: you have two machines with 52x burners, one with 48x, and two more with 24x, and one drive with 12x.....you may only be able to burn at 12x on all the drives if you are simultaneously burning.  And may have to burn slower than that if your systems are described as above with either network bandwith or hardware limitations (slow network, or slow hard drives or slow optical readers.)


So something to think about.

Now a couple questions for you to figure out what you have and need to do.

how many computers are we talking about....?
and what are the speeds of the processor and ram and burners in these machines.
What kind of network are you running?  And lets go from there.

If you have multiple burners that are the same, it may be more feasable to move the burners to the system that has the same type drive and duplicate that way.

hmm..very good points there..

Well, here is the story..

I am currently working on a SVCD Photo Album project for my Church's 5th Anniversary.What I have to produce is really just about 200 VCDs and getting them stomped.A really low budget project! ;p

I have a P4 2.4Ghz, 512 DDR PC2700, 24x Liteon, 80G Maxtor to play with and another P3 550Mhz, 256 SDRAM 133, 52x liteon, 10G Quantam networked with a Webexcel ADSL 4-port router.What I will then do is to borrow another P4 1.8Ghx, 512 DDR PC2100, 28x Liteon, 40G Seagate and a USB 2.0 External 52x to do the job.

Thats all the gear I will be getting..thinking that 4 writers to share burning 50 CDs each.So what is the most efficient and quickest way to do this?The dateline for the project is drawing near..hehe..

Any help is appreciated!

Cheers!

Thanks!!

Appreciate your help! I was thinking of burning from images from each machine in the first place and now that I have someone to confirm that it is the best way..then I can rest assured! God bless you brother! ;p

Good to see another fellow Christian serving the Lord in His church! ;p
Do you have any idea if I hook up the USB2 External to my P4 2.4G and burn it that way as multiple recorders it would work ok?

Cheers!

No prob!  God bless you to!  
I have not tried an external with an internal Befre.  It's worth a shot. Try it and see.  I would pair it up with the fastest burner and fastest machine you've got. so you may need to uninstall the 24x from the 2.4g machine and pull a 52x burner from one of the others and put that in.  see how that goes?  If it works then that'd be cool.  If not you may lose one or two CD's (at worst case).   And a lesson learned.  No big deal.  52x will burn or should burn most Cd's around 3-4 minutes...so not much time wasted either.

<edited by CetusMOD>