3 replies to this topic

[willoghby]

Hi,

I'd like to set up a small duplicating service at home, and would like to use an external firewire drive to preserve the drive inside my iMac.

My question is:
Will Toast recognize this drive and allow me to use it as the "default" Burning Drive?

Second question:
Is there any way I can set up a "Daisy-Chain" of these external Firewire burners, instead of purchasing a Duplicating tower, so that Toast will burn to all of them at the same time?

Thanks.

[tsantee]

Toast will recognize the Firewire drive (that's how I use mine). The default drive is the one you assigned to Toast when quitting Toast. If you have multiple drives daisy chained then you need to duplicate Toast and have each of them open and assigned to an individual drive. I don't know how many drives you can be burning to concurrently in this way before you start getting data transfer slow downs that lose you the speed benefit you're trying to gain by having multiple burners.

[willoghby]

tsantee,

thanks for the response, what happens if I connect 4 FW Burners to a FW hub?
Then connect the hub to my iMac's FW800 port.

I'd expect Toast not to see all the Burners???
What I'm trying to achieve, is to burn 4 DVDs at a time, directly from Toast.
I've looked at DVD Duplicators, but none of them do this.
The only way around it, is to burn the master, then insert this master into the Duplicator . . . . .  . not an ideal solution for me!

Any idea's would be most welcome.

Thanks

Edited by willoghby, 20 March 2009 - 12:27 PM.

[tsantee]

tsantee,

thanks for the response, what happens if I connect 4 FW Burners to a FW hub?
Then connect the hub to my iMac's FW800 port.

I'd expect Toast not to see all the Burners???
What I'm trying to achieve, is to burn 4 DVDs at a time, directly from Toast.
I've looked at DVD Duplicators, but none of them do this.
The only way around it, is to burn the master, then insert this master into the Duplicator . . . . .  . not an ideal solution for me!

Any idea's would be most welcome.

Thanks

If the Mac can see the Firewire drives then so can Toast. If the drives appear in System Profiler as capable of burning discs then what you'd need to do is duplicate four copies of Toast, open each one and assign each one to one of the drives. You then need to drag in your Toast project to each of the copies of Toast and click the burn button in each copy of Toast. I've never done this but it is the way Roxio has instructed this to be done. I don't know at what point there could be data transfer problems with four copies of Toast reading the same files and transferring the data through the same Firewire link.

I don't believe there are any Firewire 800 DVD drives so you'd be working at Firewire 400.