CD/DVD duplicators - what's inside?

[MichaelD]

Been looking at CD/DVD duplicators; the kind that are housed in a full tower, w/individual drives.

They typically have one "Master drive" where you put the original disc, and a bunch of writers...along with a "control panel" that fits in one 5.25" bay w/a LCD display where you pick "copy" "compare" "erase" or whatever.

OK; CD/DVD drive = IDE drive. Can have two per channel.

What's inside one of them? A motherboard with a bunch of PCI card, IDE controllers attached to the drives? How does it boot/run off that "controller drive" thing w/the lCD display?

 

[MScrip]

Inside the tower is a controller board, a power supply and the drives. Some duplicator towers have hard drives to save disc images.

Here's an example of a controller board: http://www.cybersprinter.com/item_description.asp?prodid=114283

It's probably cheaper to buy a duplicator already built... especially after you buy the controller, a tower, a power supply to support all those optical drives, and a hard drive. And they will warranty it too. But it would be fun to build one too!

 

[Rubycon]

We had SCSI duplicators with six drives per channel. Plextor drives with caddies. Yes that was a while ago. Now everything is ISCSI based.