Batch ripping CDs using USB external drives and a powered USB hub

[King Keepo]

I'm looking to convert my CD collection to FLAC and to use dBpoweramp batch ripper to do it. Given that I'm looking at in excess of 1000 CDs I'm looking to find a 10x tower to do it, but they seem a bit expensive.

Is it possible to simply stick ten external CD/DVD drives in a ten port powered USB hub plugged into my laptop (with another 10 port powered hub to power the CD drives) and have dBpoweramp recognise and rip all of them? Or is it somewhat more complicated than I think it is?

TIA

Keepo

[Spoon]

Re: Batch ripping CDs using USB external drives and a powered USB hub

>Is it possible to simply stick ten external CD/DVD drives in a ten port powered USB hub plugged into my laptop

I do not think it is, maximum of 4 drives per system, unless you have multiple PCI-e express cards and straight SATA.

USB will stall, even if using multiple PCI-e cards (it has been our experience of).

[King Keepo]

Re: Batch ripping CDs using USB external drives and a powered USB hub

>I do not think it is, maximum of 4 drives per system

Thanks, I might scale back the operation then. Or fork out for a tower on eBay. I have an eye open for a Nimbie or similar but there's nothing at the moment so I thought I might construct something myself. Even at 10 drives it seems I wouldn't be saving myself that much money over an eBay listing.

Cheers,

Keepo

[schmidj]

Re: Batch ripping CDs using USB external drives and a powered USB hub

I've been running 6 drives, 3 sata, 3 sata with USB adapters successfully in a fast as of 2013 PC, stored on a GB Ethernet QNAP NAS without difficulty since 2014. Only significant issue was that things ground to a halt when the QNAP started a chron job of antivirus check. (moved that to later in the night...) If you do any significant amount of metadata entry/QC, that will be your limiting factor. I'm using three screens with two instances displayed (one or the other) on each monitor. Any more than that, and I think I'd go nuts keeping track of which display goes with which drive. I've still screwed that up from time to time.

I actually have two left over sata ports on the motherboard, but no more space for full size drives (the only decent ones are full size, as others here will confirm) in the case and decided not to extend sata cables outside the tower case. The USB to sata converters (and external power supplies for the drives) that I've used, Sabrent work well. They even work well using Nero as a 6 machine CD duplicator (the reason I originally added the extra drives).