CD Replication Speed & Systemic Efficiency
DVD July 3rd, 2009If you’ve ever burned CDs on your home computer, then you know that the process can take a while. You copy files into the working folder, and write them directly to the CD-ROM. Depending on what kind of files you’re copying and the speed of your CD burner, this process can take a minute or more ? just to write one disk. When you factor in the time to physically swap out the media, doing a big CD duplication job can be major headache.
One major source of the slowdown on do it yourself CD-Replication is the bus speed of your computer; the speed at which your computer can send data to your CD Drive. Look at it like this ? if you’re writing a 300 MB CD image, you’re going to be loading that image into your system memory (which is fairly fast), then shoving it down a very narrow straw to your CD writing hardware; the bus speeds have improved considerably since CD writers became ubiquitous, but it’s still a major slow down.
Another source of slowdown in home CD burning is data integrity checking. Each time data is written from the CD drive to the optical disk, it reads back the data to make sure there are no errors. If any are found, it backs up and rewrites the data all over again. This is alright for a home enthusiast using a CD-ROM writing application, but it has some serious overhead.
That overhead comes from the file comparison ? it reads the data it just wrote and compares it to the source file to make sure there aren’t differences. That takes a lot of memory, and, well, it’s sending data back up that narrow data pipe between your motherboard and the CD-ROM drive.
Professional CD replication uses a different procedure entirely. First, when a professional duplicator takes the initial data file, they run the data integrity check when making what’s called a master image. This means that the read-write-verify process is done once per job, rather than once per disk; the first load up takes more time, but burning each copy is faster.
Second, their gear has a much higher transmission rate going to the CD-burning equipment itself; it’s comparable to the data transmission speeds between different components on your motherboard; the real limitation is how fast they can move the laser that burns the image.
Third, a replicator rack is a far more efficient way to burn CDs. It can burn up to 100 at a time, and many of these racks feed the disks assembly-line style through a label printer. Each CD-ROM image created this way takes about 25 to 30 seconds per disk for the entire process, which is fully automated from start to finish. The system even includes ‘tappers’ that automatically insert the disks into sleeves.
By now it should be apparent that professional CD duplication is a much more efficient process than burning disks at home. High end equipment has faster processing speeds, and automates the process to load more disks at once. But even relatively small professional replicating setups can burn 20 disks at once, and are affordable for a small business.
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