On my system, I've just got the IDE burner on its own channel (I use
an Abit BP6, so I've got four IDE channels, not a problem). I frequently
web browse, play mp3s, etc. while burning , and the 2 meg buffer on the
drive never drops below 96% full. You basically just need to be able
to sustain a little more than the speed at which the drive is writing.
For me, that's 4x, so 4*150KB = 600KB/s. I've got an IBM Deskstar
22gxp, which according to hdparm can do 17 megs a second, so not a problem.
It's probably better not to do lots of heavy drive i/o while burning, regardless
of whether you have a SCSI burner or not. Even if you've got a 486
doing the burning, how things work basically depend on how you set up your
IDE channels. As long as your hard drive and burner have their own
channels you should be fine (or at least don't use the other drives on
their channels. for example, don't put your drive and burner on the
same channel). What you can get away with really depends on how many
channels and what kind of drives you have at your disposal.
-Nick
Doc Shipley wrote:
Alex,
All the "old" CD-R faqs recommend NO other i/o activity during
a burn -
to the extent of disabling screen-savers, etc. I have a '97 copy of
the
Linux CD-R HowTo that recommends unplugging network connections! However,
I understand that the lack of isolation of IDE activity is the main
shortcoming of IDE writers. Maybe one of the hardware gurus will further
enlighten us...
--
Doc Shipley
Network Guy
TARL Labs, UT
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--
Nicholas Holifield
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
