System Efficiency and CD Replication Speed
If you’ve ever burned CDs on your home computer, then you know that the process can take a while. You copy files into the working folder, and write them directly to the CD-ROM. Depending on what kind of files you’re copying and the speed of your CD burner, this process can take a minute or more ? just to write one disk. When you factor in the time to physically swap out the media, doing a big CD duplication job can be major headache.
One of the primary causes of slowdown when doing your own CD replication is your computer’s bus speed. This is a measure of how fast your computer can send information to your CD drive. For example, if you’re copying a 300 MB CD image, you’ll first upload that image to your system memory. This is generally pretty quick. Then it is essentially pushed through a narrow ‘straw’ to your CD writing hardware. Bus speeds have improved dramatically since the early days of CD writers, but they still slow the process considerably.
Another reason personal CD burning can be slow is data integrity checking. Every time your CD drive writes data to the optical disk, it reads it back to check that it’s correctly written. If any errors are found, it backs up and rewrites the data. This is fine for small home CD-ROM writing applications, but it has some major overhead.
This overhead is a result of file comparison ? it reads and compares the newly written data to the original source file to make sure there are no differences. This occupies a lot of memory, and it sends even more information through that narrow pipe between the motherboard and the CD-ROM drive.
Professional CD replication is entirely different. First, when a professional duplicator loads the original data file, the data integrity check is run during the process of making a master image. What this means is that the read-write-check process only happens once at the beginning of the entire job, rather than once per disk. While the initial load up takes longer, this makes the process of burning each individual disk copy much quicker.
Second, professional equipment has a much faster transmission speed for relaying information to the CD burner. These speeds are comparable to data transmission speeds between various components on your motherboard. The main limiting factor is how quickly the laser that burns the image can move.
Third, a replicator rack can burn about 100 CDs at a time; many of them also feed the disks through a label printer so that the CD-ROM has the label image it’s supposed to have. Each disk image that’s burned this way takes about 25 to 30 seconds per disk, and the entire process is automated, sliding the disk along in assembly line fashion. There are even ‘tappers’ that will automatically sleeve the disks for a job.
By now it should be apparent that professional CD duplication is a much more efficient process than burning disks at home. High end equipment has faster processing speeds, and automates the process to load more disks at once. But even relatively small professional replicating setups can burn 20 disks at once, and are affordable for a small business.
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