Big Buffer

September 8, 2006 2:51 PM

What CD burners have the largest buffers?

The consumer products seem to have 2MB or 4MB buffers. I'm looking for something much larger. In fact I'd like to find one that can buffer a whole disc's worth.

Can anyone help?

posted by iconjack to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Why?
posted by crypticgeek at 3:11 PM on September 8, 2006

Yeah, I really doubt you are going to find a CD burner that can buffer 600MB of data. Crypticgeek is right, with things like burnfree, why in the world would you need to buffer all the data for a CD at once, and what do you think you would gain in being able to do so?
posted by chrisroberts at 3:25 PM on September 8, 2006

Yes...why? I've never heard of such a thing.
posted by Sonic_Molson at 3:35 PM on September 8, 2006

You can burn CDs with files on a RAM drive.
posted by aye at 3:50 PM on September 8, 2006 [1 favorite]

If you're looking to buffer an entire CD, I think you're up to the stage of wanting a CD mould, not a CD burner. I'd look around to see if there are any small-run CD fabs in your area.
posted by devilsbrigade at 3:51 PM on September 8, 2006

I've got an Apacer Disc Steno (the dvd version) and though it doesn't buffer things internally you can burn a disc directly from a memory card and it even supports disc spanning.
posted by Mitheral at 6:20 PM on September 8, 2006

It's for a real-time data acquisition project. The data comes in large bursts. The computer needs to dump its memory to the CD as fast as possible, and then be on its way, unencumbered by the chore of throttling out data to the CD burner.
posted by iconjack at 8:02 AM on September 9, 2006

Well, if the data comes in large bursts like that, what would be the problem with dumping it into a temporary file? Would it be a problem to dump the information into a temp file, close it once it was big enough, start the burn and open a new temp file to start dumping new information into and just repeat the process?
posted by chrisroberts at 8:39 AM on September 9, 2006

Yes, because there is no hard drive in the system. The simplest solution for this project would be a burner with a huge buffer. Hence my question about burners with large buffers.
posted by iconjack at 9:48 AM on September 9, 2006

Well, I think this is something you would have to do yourself, using something like a ram card or flash memory. Depending on what you are using, you can either just access this extra memory directly, or using something like ramfs to buffer your data until you are ready to burn. I have never heard of any CD burner able to buffer an entire CD and think that to get that, you would pretty much have to have it custom made. I could be wrong about this, but all of my searching has backed this thought up. So I would have to go with moving your solution away from a huge internal buffer to a buffer you make yourself.

What ever you end up doing for a solution to this problem, please be sure to update here. I'm interested to see what you do in the end.
posted by chrisroberts at 10:57 AM on September 9, 2006

Is there a reason you want data on CD rather than on disk? If it's just cost you're worrying about, you can get a 200 GB drive for $50 retail, whereas a 100-pack of CD-Rs will run you ~$15, and it will take you 3 of those to equal one 200 GB drive.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 1:14 PM on September 9, 2006

Even if its going to end up on CD, you're going to want to buffer it anyway. A 10GB drive is dirt cheap & won't have any trouble reading/writing faster than 52x.
posted by devilsbrigade at 10:07 PM on September 9, 2006