windows DVD/CD burn problems

[ribitch]

One of my clients has a Windows XP box with 9 Pioneer DVR-109's all attached to 2 SCSI cards. One has 3 drives, the other has 6 split between 2 connectors. The SCSI cable is then connected to a SCSI to IDE converter at each drive.

This setup worked flawlessly with just CD-RW drives. When trying to burn DVD's, they fail like crazy. The machine is a 3.0GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM. its only job is to pull images off a server using a gigabit connection, and burn them to several disks at one time as fast as possible. Currently, the fastest possible is 3 drives at 1x. I know the PCI and SCSI buses are nowhere near being flooded, the Network utilization is under 10%, and the CPU utilization is under 25% during the burn process.

What can be going wrong here? I have tried alcohol 120%, RecordNow 4.6 (supports multiburners, and clients preferred app), and i will soon be trying nero.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Its costly to let it fail on some many drives at one time, so I need a solution ASAP. Thanks!

[Jeffbx]

Are you burning the images directly from the server, or are you copying them to the local HD 1st? Is the HD on the same SCSI connection as the burners?

You might consider an automated duplicator instead... they're expensive, but boy do they crank out the copies, even from the network.

http://www.rimage.com
http://www.primera.com

[ribitch]

the files are stored on a server. The client doesnt want a duplicator. He wants to be able to drag the photos to a new disk, click burn, and split out the needed number of disks. this is usually between 3 and 9 copies.

The HD is a parallel ATA drive. The photos are on the server. The same issue exists if copying the photos to the local HD.

The SCSI adaptors are Adaptec 39160's.

[johnnymk]

I have a 29160 card in a completely SCSI system, and the CDRWs are also SCSI. The hard drive is a 15K SCSI IBM LVD unit.

Let's see, 1X=150 Kb/sec. for CDRWs. So at 52X it would utilize approx. 8 MB/sec. For three units, it would utilize 24 MB/sec. Should not be a problem for the SCSI card.

I forget the ratio of speeds for DVD-RW, but I recall something like 4? times the CDRW equivalent. In other words, a 1X DVD-RW would be equivalent to a 4X CDRW. I could be way off on that ratio.

But I do know that you have to total the speed of the writers, but I am sure you know that.

I remember something about combining LVD and Single Ended devices on the same cable, in that that the throughput speed would be reduced to the slowest device on that cable.

Plus I am wondering about that IDE/SCSI adapter, if it's presence could reduce performance in the chain?

If you can't figure what to do with settings, I would try a cheap 9 or 18 GB 10K SCSI 68 pin hard drive just to see if it makes any difference. And I believe it would have to be on it's own dedicated cable.

[Jeffbx]

One other thing I just thought of - maybe a firmware issue on the DVD drives or SCSI cards? Have you tried updating?

[ribitch]

scsi cards are up to date, same with the dvd drives and the scsi bridges

I installed nero, removed 3 drives, and burned 6 CD's at 40x with no issues.

I then tried 6 DVD's at 12x and failed. I then tried 3 DVD's at 12x and failed. the burn gets to 3% then halts.

They are looking to move to dual layer media soon, so they are desperate for a fix. A single photoshoot can have 10's of GB of data. They were dumping the pictures on iPods and giving the client an iPod full of pictures, but thats not always an option due to the cost of an iPod.

[Jeffbx]

Jeez - sounds like they *need* a duplicator whether they want one or not.

What about this - burn a single DVD from the server & the drop it into one of these - http://www.kanguru.com/1to7dvddup.html

Much cheaper than a robotic solution, but just as fast for small batches of DVDs.