#cd duplication
5 messages in this thread
I am looking for some recommendations for CD duplication equipment. This will
be sued in a med volume fashion to start and over a year or less increase to a
high volume operation. I need a few recommendations and my client will contact
them after they review the recommendations. Thanks for your help Ray
Um… sued… interesting choice of words in a CD duplication message! (hehe)
This all depends on what you mean about high volume. If you want a garage
operation to press your own CD's, then do this:
1 100Mb/s LAN Containing:
1 NT Advanced Server
w/Quad Speed CD ROM with Cacheing controller.
1 NT WorkStation
w/ one or several CDR drives.
There you go! Since you would be running NT, you would be able to burn several
CD's at once on the workstation. Just add more workstations for more capacity.
And you can tell the other workstations to start copying from the server. You
could then write a little application/batch file that would fire xcopy on the
workstations that would xcopy the entire CD from the server to their local
CDR's. If you had 6 CDR's per workstations, and say 10 Workstations; you could
crank out a descent number of ROMS.
Now, if you want professional capabilities, you going to want to go an entirely
different route. There are "jukebox" CD duplicators, that you load with 100
blanks, and it burns them (but one at a time). Or you could outsouce it.
Might be just a cost effective.
Lets fantasize: One, dual P90 with 128 Mb of Ram, PCI SCSI-2 Cacheing with 16
Mb cache (if not more). RAID drive array to hold mirror of the CD.
20 DX2-66 16Mb NT workstations with PCI SCSI-2 booting off a 500mb IDE. Each
has 6 CDR drives (ie. HP's new one) connected.
You have two racks back to back. One with workstations, the other with CDR's.
From the server you type something like
"\\client001 xcopy f:\*.* d: /s"
or you put it all in a batch file so it does the command for all drives.
Now you burn 120 at a time.
And, it's completely scaleable. If the traffic is too high on one server; find
the max number of clients, add a server for each of those, map the new clients
to the new server, add them to your batch file list.
Wow, can't believe I thought of this. Maybe I ought to open a CD Dupping
service! 😉
Professional job. Right now the inforamtion is taken from a tape and sent to a
disk duplication system which produces disks. The disks are all different in
that each customer has their own information on them. So depending on the size
of the client they could have 1 to 20 compressed disks. The trick is to apply
the same to the manufacture of the CD's. Each customer has different
information so that I would need to be able to automatically if possible (it
has to be) produce CD'S for different customers with different account
information. Have I complicated it enough? Thanks Chris I really appreciate the
help. Ray
Is this data in the form of a database or directory structure?
Database: (depending on the type) You could write a VB app that would first
grep the database for the different customers, then prompt you how many copyies
you needed per customer. You'd enter the volume amount, then it would prompt
you when it needed a CD replaced.
The application could dynamicly allocate the drives for the customers. Say you
had a cust. who needed two copies, while another needed 10. The app would
count how many drives it could see, or how many drives the servers saw, then on
a percentage basis allocate drives for customers.
Directory Structure: Easier. Same as above. The only requirement here is that
your data naming conventions are consistant. Now, if you are using NT or '95
allready, you have 256 char. filenames. You could then make the directory name
be say 50 char., and use the other 200 for a keycode that would hold data for
you CD Pressing.
Another thing to think about. If this is your data, the entire CD pressing
could be automated by week, month, quarter, or yearly.
The app would take a datasnapshot the third weekend of the month and press it
over the next week.
I cannot believe the line noise . Thanks Chris. The process currently works
something like this. We take a nine track tape and feed it inot a big PC. Then
we send the data to a disk duplicator. The duplicator will create the disksk
sort them and place lablels on them for each customer. this is all done
automatically.The PC has a routine whihc reads the beginning and end of each
account so it knows what lable to place on them. Slick. I want to do the same
thing with the CD's. What do yo think. ray