Batch Ripper - Low-cost ripping setup

[chillburgh]

So I've been following the batch ripper discussions and have been trying to determine what it would take to build a low-rent "pro-sumer" ripping platform.

The goal would be to be able to rip FLAC at close to full speed (~150x or higher).

Most of you with your automated loaders are surely much more knowledgeable than I regarding these topics, so I wanted to get some opinions on where the weak link would be in a setup such as this:

Drives: (4) Asus CD-S520B2 IDE 52x CD-ROM
- http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16827135155

Drive Enclosure: Mapower MAP-5041-FW 5.25-inch 4 Bay External Firewire Enclosure
- http://www.censuspc.com/Mapower-5.25...W-pr-3507.html

PC: basic Dual core proc, 1gb RAM, SATA II drive, FireWire card


Now obviously this is far from the IDEAL setup for something like this, but it seems that it would be functional (albeit a manual process to swap disks). But for basically $250 more than a standard PC it would theoretically rip at 4x the speed.

What am I missing here?

[bhoar]

Re: Batch Ripper - Low-cost ripping setup

I'm not an expert in choosing drives, so I'll skip commenting on drive choice.

I'm glad the enclosure has two separate firewire bridges. Firewire is best, check. Oxford 911 is good. I suggest that, instead of chaining, you connected each bridge to a separate firewire port on the PC to avoid potential congestion.

The enclosure seems to have good cooling which will be important for ultra secure ripping.

There might be an impact on firewire chipset in the PC's firewire controller, might be worth checking club.cdfreaks.com about that.

And to revisit your last comment: this isn't far from ideall, it's cheap and effective. For a 400 disc collection, 100 disc swap interruptions is a hell of a lot better than 400 disc swap interruptions. Plus, you can try using the PC's internal DVD drive(s) to see if they speed up (or slow down) ripping the beginning of the collection...at least until the old IDE DMA feature (bug) gets triggered on them.

-brendan

[chillburgh]

Re: Batch Ripper - Low-cost ripping setup

Oh - absolutely. I'm a Plextor guy, personally (love my 716a) but for the purposes of keeping costs down I picked el-cheapo CD-ROM only drives.

And yes, the enclosure has multiple firewire bridges and yes I would use two separate "uplinks" to avoid congestion (although I would have to think that only 4 drives SHOULD be able to max out on a single firewire link).

at least until the old IDE DMA feature (bug) gets triggered on them

I assume you refer to the "dropping to PIO mode" feature?

Thanks for the input, Brendan. I'm looking forward to future releases of the batch ripper.

[bhoar]

Re: Batch Ripper - Low-cost ripping setup

And yes, the enclosure has multiple firewire bridges and yes I would use two separate "uplinks" to avoid congestion (although I would have to think that only 4 drives SHOULD be able to max out on a single firewire link).

Sure, but if you start seeing some of the same odd slowdown behavior that I see with 3+ drives, you will have already removed firewire hardware issues from the equation.

I haven't worked on it recently, but I couldn't explain the behavior after a few days of testing many different changes.

-brendan