Cost effective methods of burning hundreds of DVDs
Judge Joe Brown
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I have this client that is in the music biz. He wants me to set up his studio with a way of creating tons of his own discs, but it's a pretty small business so they're trying to keep costs pretty low.
They need to produce maybe 100-500 DVD's a month, one quarter a year. Not a huge operation really.
I have access to very cheap, decent quality external DVD burners. I also have access to cheap computers and other computer parts. However, I also know that DVD replication machines are really really expensive. They could also use a spare computer anyways.
Is it feasible to get like, 7 DVD external drives and 4-5 HDD's serving images, and burning 7 discs at a time? Are multiple HDD's going to be necessary (I'm assuming yes, because one HDD serving 7 burners doesn't make much sense to me).
Am I missing a better option?
They need to produce maybe 100-500 DVD's a month, one quarter a year. Not a huge operation really.
I have access to very cheap, decent quality external DVD burners. I also have access to cheap computers and other computer parts. However, I also know that DVD replication machines are really really expensive. They could also use a spare computer anyways.
Is it feasible to get like, 7 DVD external drives and 4-5 HDD's serving images, and burning 7 discs at a time? Are multiple HDD's going to be necessary (I'm assuming yes, because one HDD serving 7 burners doesn't make much sense to me).
Am I missing a better option?
Judge Joe Brown on
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The labour really wouldn't be that bad. A few hours one day a month on 7 burners would produce enough discs. It would be a much better option to build a system capable of burning discs than to buy a duplicator which will do no more than burn.
My main question is really the technical feasibility of installing 7 dvd burners on one home computer.
We use an older version of the cheapest one of these at work:
http://www.primera.com/mid_range_duplicators.html
It's great because it's fully automated. You tell it you want to make x copies, start it up, and end up with a stack of burned discs. It's like the Terminator - it doesn't feel pity or remorse, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until it finishes the job or runs out of blank discs.
When you look at the price of a solution, you need to look at the total cost, not just how much the parts are going to cost you. How expensive will it be to support, use, etc.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
It should work in theory. Although I've never done this before, but I can imagine that it would be taxing as hell on whatever computer the stuff is working from to burn 7 discs at once. If the computer can't keep up then the discs will be prone to errors. Or even worse the compie may lock up in mid burn. So make sure whatever computer you use is up to the task.
If he wants to do it for *really cheap*, the best way is simply to install a DVD burner (8x at least) and the required software on a computer he already has, and then just spend all day feeding it discs. If the discs are relatively full it will take about 10-20 minutes to burn, so he just spends all day feeding it in while doing other things.
I wouldn't get involved with turning a throwaway computer into a duplicator, simply because most home computer parts (that are cheap) aren't made to handle that kind of bandwidth all at once.
It would be a quad core.
I had 2 SATA HDD's, and 2 external HDD's on USB.
1 SATA DVD burner, 2 PATA DVD burners(on different channels), and 1 External USB DVD burner.
I had to burn almost 400 DVD's.(4 copies of a 96 disc set)
I used Nero 6 for it, I was able to run 4 instances of it, and have each instance burn to a different device. the computer was pretty much relegated to burning only while I was doing it. I didn't try to do anything else, even web browsing while doing all of that.
It worked reasonably well, but was time intensive, and sometimes difficult to keep track of.