It is important to note that most CD and DVD Writers can operate in DMA
Mode 2. This is 33 MegaBytes Per Second for the max throughput. The
only way you are going to be able to burn a DVD at anthing higher than
8x over a network is if the network is capable of transfering that
amount of data which would require a Gigabit Network.

Also important to note is that most of these hardware components only
operate at about 80% efficiency. This means with DMA Mode 2 (33 MB/s),
you really only get around 25 MB/s. Burning 16x DVD's requires about 22
MB/s.

One way to make sure that your DVD's and CD's are properly burned over
the network would be to limit the speed of writing to handle the amount
of data that can be transfered (and allow room for error as well). Here
are my suggestions for writing to a CD over a network:

For 10 MBit Networks:
CD Burn speed of 4x (Though 8x may be possible, I wouldn't recommend it)
DVD Burning will not work on a 10 MBit network

For 100 MBit Networks:
CD Burn speed of 52x (Full speed should be supported)
DVD Burn speed of 8x (May lower to 4x on high traffic networks)

----
Nathan McNulty


Steve Winograd [MVP] wrote:
In article , "Mike Matheny"
mikematheny@swbelldotnet wrote:

When you share a CD or DVD writer over a network, it's shared as a
read-only device, even if you've specified write access. It isn't
possible to write to it from another computer. An Ethernet network
connection can't supply data fast enough to support CD or DVD burning.

Well, you're correct about not writing to the CD writer, but wrong about not
being able to supply data fast enough through a network - even the fastest
IDE subsystem cannot perform as fast as even a 10mb network.


Are you sure about that, Mike? Here are the rated transfer speeds of
some systems:

Ultra ATA/33 IDE drive interface:
33 megabytes/second

Ultra ATA/66 IDE drive interface
66 megabytes/second

Ultra ATA/100 IDE drive interface
100 megabytes/second

10BaseT Ethernet:
10 megabits/second = 1.25 megabytes/second

100BaseTx (Fast) Ethernet
100 megabits/second = 12.5 megabytes/second

As I interpret those numbers, the slowest IDE disk is almost three
times faster than Fast Ethernet. Is that right?

I've measured actual speeds for disk copies over a Fast Ethernet
network, and the result is typically 50-70 megabits/second. That
involves reading one computer's disk and writing the other computer's
disk, and it's much faster than a 10 megabit/second network.