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Topic: What is the best/fastest drive for EAC? (Read 26391 times) previous topic - next topic
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What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #25
I suggest plextor because:

-cache can be disable with -usefua, allowing secure ripping speeds in EAC up to ~38x (fastest I have had)
-all real plex drive I know of overread into lead in/out
-while I have had different discs that cannot be read in one of my plex drives, I have never had a disc that could not be read in any of them

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #26
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to jcoalson

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I'm looking to build a PC dedicated to ripping. After a semi-successful weekend 'ripping party' (we ripped 1500 CD's in two days, but our target was 5,000...lol... a true learning experience that I intend to document in the future), I'm convinced I want to build a machine dedicated to this task.


I have been a member for some time and enjoy the wealth of information here. I would hate to see HA closed for piracy related issues.
If you have nothing to contribute other than giving me a hard time, you may want to move to another thread.
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oh ddrawley HA is not going to close. worst comes we can always move the server to antarctica, i reckon the polar bear congress didn't pass any DMCA clones yet.

as for fast drives mine is certainly quick enough, it's an NEC double layer writer and it rips in secure mode at about 12x. that's without C2 enable. if i use C2 it will go to 14x or 16x in secure mode and 30x or so in burst mode.
Be healthy, be kind, grow rich and prosper

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #27
What does hosting cost in Antarctica these days anyways?

There are probably lots of places in the world (where we actually have a lot of users) that don't restrict content like the USA, Germany, or any other place with overzealous copyright laws.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #28
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I have a BenQ 1620A (I think) that is almost useless for Ripping Audio, so I would recommend staying away from that line of DVD Burners.

What makes it so bad, specifically? I've read many times* that the BenQ DW16xx drives are pretty good.

* for instance: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=41031

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #29
When I decided to rip around 500 CDs of my own when I bought mp3 player (I hated compressing every day CD I wanted to listen tomorrow), I went and bought SCSI controller (Adaptec AHA something) and Plextor Ultraplex PX-40TSi, used, but in perfect condition, served as installation CD rom in one server, used few times for setting the server up.

I can say that, of all drives I've seen ripping, this BEAST is the fastest and most secure ripper I've ever seen and tested. AFAIR, it doesn't cache audio, it has almost perfect C2 error handling, and I've seen it go to 30x in secure ripping in EAC, and 40x with Plextools.

Both things costed me some 15 dollars, and with one SCSI controller you can have 7 to 14 of these drives, depending on controller. I don't know about software which will drive that much drives, though, I never had to do something like that.

Bear in mind that this drive doesn't like windows XP very much, but it is perfectly satisfied with windows 2000.

Ivan.
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What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #30
I guess I could sum up the SCSI advantage in a few bullets:

1. SCSI will have a dedicated IO controller, reducing CPU load caused by ripping from so many drives at once.

2. An external enclosure will have its own power supply, so you don't have to put a beastly one inside your computer.

3. Six or eight drives would require a monster size computer case.

4. An external case could be shuffled between people that needed to use it. Just put a SCSI controller in each machine that needs it's services and hook up the external cable as needed. A good SCSI controller is less than $75.

5. I did see SCSI Plextor drives for around $45 on pricewatch.com. I cannot vouch for the condition of the drives or the seller.

6. Multiple SATA controllers will require multiple IRQ's, and are CPU dependent. Can you say pain in the rear, I knew you could.

7. SCSI is inherently sexy.


I set up a bank of  drives for a law firm once. It worked like a champ.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #31
Quote
What makes it so bad, specifically? I've read many times* that the BenQ DW16xx drives are pretty good.

* for instance: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=41031
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Let me think about my BenQ DW1620A:
At first it seemed good and fast, but then, on the first computer I used it on, it'd basically lock up the computer when I tried ripping about 1/3 of the time.  Not terribly convenient.  Everything would just slow down to a crawl, and the system would be virtually unresponsive.
I swapped it into a different computer at a later time, and, and now I can't get anything other than "Can't detect valid read command" or some similar error... basically, it won't rip any audio at all with EAC.  So it's firmly on my "not recommended list".  Perhaps their later burners in that series have improved, or maybe it's just a problem with AMD processor chipsets or something that happens to only affect me.


hlloyge:
That setup sounds wicked.  I've always wanted to experiment with a SCSI burner.  On my PC, I can't even play audio while I rip a CD.  It'd be nice to have a setup like that where the disk I/O won't bog down your whole system.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #32
Everyone.. Thanks... this has been a great discussion.  At this point I'm going to try a SCSI setup.  I talked to my friend last night, and he has a 16 bay SCSI tower that is full of drives -- I don't know if the drives are any good, but what I will do is buy a few different drives and test.  I think SCSI is gonna be the only way to get more than 3 discs ripping concurrently with any stability.

Last night I did some more testing... I have acquired about 40 CDROM drives from our graveyard here at work.. the fastest I've found so far is a Mitsumi FX-5411M -- no cache, with C2.  No matter what I install it in, it always rips faster if I attach it with a USB 2.0 adapter (as opposed to IDE).  It will rip at 25X on a nice Dell P4 (Precision 340), and at 15X on an Optiplex GX110 P3 733.  This proves the fact that bus speeds, etc. play an important role in overall ripping speed -- it's definitely more than just the drive...

Scott

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #33
One thing I would also play with if how many disks you do at once. If your goal is to just put a disk in every drive and come back a few days later, that is one thing, but for over all speed there will defianatly be an optimal number you can run at one time. For instance, on my computer it is way faster to just do 2 back to back than 2 at once. Also, for fastest encoding I'm pretty sure you will want to go with a dual core processor.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #34
Quote
Quote
What makes it so bad, specifically? ....

At first it seemed good and fast, but then ....

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #35
Scott, did you say that it rips FASTER with a USB2 enclosure?  Wouldn't that severely limit the bus speed?  That seems like quite an anomaly.

Also, to rip with more than one drive at a time with any type of convenience features, wouldn't you need some special software?  I have a feeling you couldn't just run multiple instances of EAC.  But if that works, I'd like to know!

The last thing I'd like to know is this...  is there some way of automatically loading discs by using a spindle of some sort?  That would make this real simple... just fill up the spindle and walk away.  You can use some kind of automated tagging software later on to label.  For me, that's usually the slowest part.  I can rip one CD while I encode another.

[edit]
There are a number of autoloaders intended for mass duplication of hundreds of discs... but they are thousands of dollars, and I'm not sure if they can be used to actually READ cds, particularily audio.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #36
Quote
hlloyge:
That setup sounds wicked.  I've always wanted to experiment with a SCSI burner.  On my PC, I can't even play audio while I rip a CD.  It'd be nice to have a setup like that where the disk I/O won't bog down your whole system.
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Well, it was wicked. But I took the job slowly, it took me about a month to do the ripping and encoding, as I only had an hour or two a day to do the ripping. So, what I did is loaded CD in EAC, ripped to mp3, then loaded another, and another... while ripping, encoding queue was filling. Later on, I let EAC encode and tag mp3s until it was finished, which was very slow, as my machine is 1.2 GHz Duron.

But as far as SCSI is concerned, it is really good, but this particular setup didn't really liked my windows XP, drive would sometimes reset SCSI bus, which resulted in slowing ripping speed to 4X for the rest of that CD. No errors, though, it would just pick up where it stopped. This happened to me in 1 out of 10 CDs, so I didn't really bothered, as I searched various forums (I had plenty of time while EAC was encoding)  and saw that this particular Plextor drive had problems, and as I understood, because it is not using MMC standard calls, but it's own. I tested it on windows 2000 later, and it worked like charm, without reseting SCSI bus.

I would reccomend it to everyone to try it out, but finding it in good condition is rather tricky - and the reseting isn't really everyone would want. I guess there are IDE or SATA drives that can rip as good as this one - but this one is really tested through the years, and I've read only praises for it. That's why I bought it.

Now it stands in my desk drawer  I don't really need it. Any new CD I buy I rip with my DVD drive, or if copy protected, I have several drives at work, so I try to rip it there, mostly successful.

Ivan.

Ivan.
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What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #37
Okay.  I have found it... an automated solution for quickly ripping many audio CDs:
http://www.ripfactory.com/robotics.html

I was contacted by a guy named Doug Strachota from Get Digital, and he told me that they make the kinds of automated solutions that I've been looking for.

Of course, it would be hard for me to part with EAC, but if you've got a thousand CDs to rip in a short period of time, this would do it almost completely automatically.  Nice!
Doug also said:

Quote
The most economical solution is to purchase the Ripstation Lite Pro from
Ripfactory.  I'm not sure about the price, but I think it's around $1000.
www.ripfactory.com.  Otherwise the Primera Bravo II would be the next
cheapest changer.



I may look into that, but for me to spend that kind of money, I'm pretty much going to have to start a business doing this as a service for other people, I think.  Thought it might be interesting for others with this need.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #38
What about the Plextor PX-130? Would that be a VERY GOOD drive to use with EAC?

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #39
Smack2000, did you ever find a solution to ripping your CDs with a Powerfile C200?? My student radio station just bought a powerfile c200 for that purpose (we have 6,000 CDs to rip to a 3TB RAID 5 array we just built), and now we're stuck, unless we pay $800, for mammoth software's "PowerRipper". www.mammothi.com

If someone just made an open source version of a ripping program for Powerfile C200, that would open up worlds of possibilities for consumers' audio storage everywhere...

I'll send you a PM too.

-Mitch
WQHS.org

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #40
Smack2000, did you ever find a solution to ripping your CDs with a Powerfile C200?? My student radio station just bought a powerfile c200 for that purpose (we have 6,000 CDs to rip to a 3TB RAID 5 array we just built), and now we're stuck, unless we pay $800, for mammoth software's "PowerRipper". www.mammothi.com

If someone just made an open source version of a ripping program for Powerfile C200, that would open up worlds of possibilities for consumers' audio storage everywhere...

I'll send you a PM too.

-Mitch
WQHS.org


Good old RAID mania again...

Maybe if you had realized that RAID5 is totally pointless  in your usage scenario (for student radio station that is), then you would have saved a lot more than $800.

Triza

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #41
Why is a RAID5 totally pointless?  I have a small RAID5 (only 1TB though) and it serves me rather well in a bar I DJ in.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #42
Why is a RAID5 totally pointless?  I have a small RAID5 (only 1TB though) and it serves me rather well in a bar I DJ in.


For you and for this bloke RAID1 is also overkill, let alone RAID5. Both of you can handle a drive failure. Working in a bar or a student radio is not something that cannot be stopped until replacement arrives. If you are adamant that your case is different, which I can sympathize with, esp if you are responsible for a lot of paying customers on a Friday night, then RAID1 is more than enough for you. It would save you a lot of money and noise and power.

RAID5 makes sense on large servers that cannot be taken offline.

Personally I would not hold music collection at home or even on a student radio station on any RAID since all the data must be restorable from backup and outage is acceptable in those rare cases when the drive fails.

My personal PC I use every day has RAID1 because I do not want to loose even a few days work between backups. You know I forget what I do and save and write almost immediately I did it, so it is important that they must be safe.

And remember: RAID is not a backup.

Triza

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #43
Rubbish. RAID5 can easily be done even in software these days and with the price of HD's it's perfectly feasible to have a large capacity, redundant & fast array on the cheap that can be used for anything you want.

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #44
Hi,
another option would be encoder pro from doublecentury software. but ever disc ripped costs 29c.
Anyone know of another software provider?
regards
Stephen

Smack2000, did you ever find a solution to ripping your CDs with a Powerfile C200?? My student radio station just bought a powerfile c200 for that purpose (we have 6,000 CDs to rip to a 3TB RAID 5 array we just built), and now we're stuck, unless we pay $800, for mammoth software's "PowerRipper". www.mammothi.com

If someone just made an open source version of a ripping program for Powerfile C200, that would open up worlds of possibilities for consumers' audio storage everywhere...

I'll send you a PM too.

-Mitch
WQHS.org

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #45
FYI, there's a semi-recent patch to mtx on the mtx mailing list for the Sony XL1B/XL1B2 changer, which I understand is based on the Powerfile platform, so the patch may work for both. 

mtx is a program used for scripting tape and disc changers using the standard Medium Changer SCSI command sets.  It generally runs under linux, but has been ported elsewhere.

-brendan

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #46
Also, to rip with more than one drive at a time with any type of convenience features, wouldn't you need some special software?  I have a feeling you couldn't just run multiple instances of EAC.  But if that works, I'd like to know!


Yes, you can run multiple instance of EAC. It works better if each executable has its own folder - that way the queues are discrete, and if one shuts down, you don't lose it's queue.

I'm running 4 Drives (2 Int, 2 Ext USB) / 4 instances of EAC on each of two PC for a total of 8 rips at a time.  I don't run the drives fast - 8-16x, but the parallelism makes up for it. The slower rips seem to raise the EAC error bars less often.

Tips (if you wan to try this)
- Make an EAC profile for each instance that ties it to a specific drive. Load it right after you launch each EAC.
- Try not to run more than 2 instances of your compressor per machine. More than two slows down the rip and can cause rip problems. Make the other queues sleep. You can start them up after the session is over.
- Accurate Rip gets a little confused until all the drives have been profiled, then it works.
- All the instances can share a single compression executable - LAME, FLAC, etc.
- Make sure the drive cool down flag is set in EAC.

I'm using Toshiba & Samsung drives with Okgear enclosures. Each external set up cost about $40. - 20 for the drive and 20 for the enclosure. Adds up, but cheaper than an autoloader.
EAC secure | FLAC  --best -V -b 4096 | LAME 3.97 -V0 -q0 -b32

What is the best/fastest drive for EAC?

Reply #47
jcoalson, I didn't see that you are a FLAC developer at first. Thank you for a great utility.

"sorry, i am apologizing to you because you have a high standing point in HA for developing FLAC, if I had not known this i wouldn't be apologizing"
err... i'm not using windows any more ;)