Building A Ripping Machine

[Qest]

I have dozens of old IDE CD-ROM drives hanging around and I was considering buying a couple of these and shoving them in an old P4 computer to make a ripping machine with 10+ drives and using batch ripper on the software side.

Does anyone see any issues with this plan? Hardware, software or otherwise?

Thanks,
Qest

[EliC]

Re: Building A Ripping Machine

your cpu is going to have a hell of a time keeping up.

[Spoon]

Re: Building A Ripping Machine

I recommend 4 drives per system, or 6 if you want to push it (have a quad core system).

[EliC]

Re: Building A Ripping Machine

spoon, I have suggested before a setting in the batch ripper for a max number of simultaneous rips for just this reason. A user could easily set up 10 drives, load them all manually, set max number of rips at 2-6, walk away and come back later when they are all done and reload.

[bhoar]

Re: Building A Ripping Machine

spoon, I have suggested before a setting in the batch ripper for a max number of simultaneous rips for just this reason. A user could easily set up 10 drives, load them all manually, set max number of rips at 2-6, walk away and come back later when they are all done and reload.

I concur with Eli here. The easiest way, from a development perspective, would be to add a batch ripper setting that throttles the number of cdgrab.exe processes that can be running at once. Any drives that are loaded when the limit is reached would be put into a FIFO queue to be processed. This would allow for a poor-man's semi-automated ripping system.

One could see this as an easy way to use six or more drives to keep four cdgrab.exe threads always running and fully utilizing CPU and disk I/O. You can't do that with just four drives (because one or more drives may be idle for disc reloads) but if you have six or eight, you're almost assured that four discs are always ripping.

The same feature could be used with six or eight drive robotic rippers to prevent IO overload issues. As above, you'd get better throughput than just configuring only four drives.

-brendan