Linux Burning to multiple CD drives at the same time in linux

I want to be able to burn 9 different ISO's to 9 different IDE drives (via Promise IDE controllers) on the same Linux-based machine.

What would be the ideal hardware setup?

I've got a case that holds 9 drives, and a Micro-ATX board should fit, and Promise IDE controllers claim to work well with Linux, but my main problem is heat. I'd rather not make this sound like a jet-engine and just want one 120mm case fan on the side right next to the motherboard. (plus the single PSU fan)

Could I get away with a low-powered laptop processor with passive-cooling and the single case fan at low speeds?

Also, what wattage PSU would I need for 9 DVD burners, a motherboard, and a hard drive?

Any tips on this project would be appreciative, as now that I've got a touch-screen and a 9-bay CD tower, I'm pretty eager to get started

 

First of all, I take it you're aware of the bandwidth limitations of sharing an IDE socket between two drives.

Secondly, it depends on how fast you want things to be. Sure, you can use a low-power CPU, but it will be slow at burning 9 isos. While this may be acceptable for the occasional burn, if you're repeatedly burning 9 isos at a time, you may find it becomes a real PITA. For such a task you really have only two choices if you're looking for speed: multi-core or clustering.

If you decide on multi-core, then make sure your kernel is compiled with SMP support otherwise you won't get the load balancing you're paying for.

If you have additional machines lying around idle then you could put their processing power to use by clustering them with something like ParallelKnoppix. Clustering two or more multi-core machines (each with SMP kernels, of course) would be your nirvana.

As to power requirements, it will depend on the draw of each burner. Find out the power consumption of each part of you setup and then just sum them. That will be your power requirement.

 

it really won't work well with IDE drives, Having tried something similar ripping 4 CD's from 4 drives symoultaniously it ended up being quicker to do one at a time in one drive, something to do with the way the bus deals with multiple data streams really badly.

what you need are SATA CD burners or SCSI (if you can find them)

 

Interested in your final result

One Seventeen

I know this post is a little old but i am interested in it because I hav need to burn multiple different sets of files to multiple different cd's as you mentioned. I looked at Padus diskjuggler but there are some issues with it that make it less than ideal for us. I am most interested in the software you use to do this.

We do not need to do 9 drives in one I am thinking 2 towers of 4 or five so the hardware will be simple enough

Anyone who has any info on this I would appreciate a message

 

Burning needs to be done precisely, and requires the CPU to not be under any strain....

Trying to burn 9 isos across several burners with anything less than an i7 seems like suicide to me....

Your best bet would be a quad and 4 SATA burners... As mentioned before, the bandwidth across 9 IDEs what be horrible, creating yet more chance for errors and incorrect burns.

Having said that, the best way is to just do them one at a time, at the slowest speed (typically 2x DVD, 16X CD) verifying with reliable media.

It seems like over kill, but if you meet those three conditions, you'll rarely get a bad burn. Trying to do 4+ at a time and I'd expect a fair few bad burns, especially on DVDs.