Help/Suggestions on 6 drive Homebrew Ripper

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Looking for help or suggestions on building a manual 6/8 drive Batch Ripper. What is the best IDE drive? What is the best USB drive? What is the best SATA drive? Should I consider any other types of drives?

What is the best layout to have one hardrive and 6 to 8 ripping drives in a home PC?

[bhoar]

Re: Help/Suggestions on 6 drive Homebrew Ripper

Looking for help or suggestions on building a manual 6/8 drive Batch Ripper. What is the best IDE drive? What is the best USB drive? What is the best SATA drive? Should I consider any other types of drives?

What is the best layout to have one hardrive and 6 to 8 ripping drives in a home PC?

I can only give general answers, because I haven't really performed intensive testing of drive X vs. drive Y.

My general recommendation for highest throughput would be two machines, each two or four cores, each with 3-4 drives. I've run into unexplained IO throttling when running four or more drives in parallel extractions, even if I'm just extracting to the test codec that doesn't write data to the hard drive. I suspect the issue is deep in windows somewhere, perhaps fixable via some esoteric registry setting...but I haven't been able to track it down yet.

With IDE (and SATA in compatibility mode), you can run into a problem where Windows' IDE driver, when handling failed CD reads due to scratches, resets the IO modes to slower PIO modes, making optical drive IO incredibly slow. It takes some registry work and a reboot or two to fix this problem.

With SATA in native mode, you might run into dbpoweramp compatibility problems (with some chipsets/drivers). I don't have much experience here, but some people report no problems, others fix it by setting SATA to compatibility mode (but see above).

With USB, you might run into incompatible chipsets (less likely these days) and/or chipsets that don't handle the delays caused by the drive taking longer than expected when reading scratched CDs. Symptom is often the USB device unexpectedly "unsafely" disconnecting itself in the middle of an audio extraction.

With firewire there used to be a lot of problems, but spoon made several adjustments to the alignment/buffer handling code and most firewire bridges seem to work now (except, unfortunately, the one in the sony xl1b and perhaps powerfile units).