hi, i know a tiny bit about how electronics work and learning more every day. But i am very good with computers and putting them together. My dad owns a recording studio and sometimes needs to duplicate several cds. We have to do it with a burner meant for audio masters...one at a time :cry: and its my job to load it. Just finished doin 50 cds, took 14 hours. Ive seen towers of 7 or so cd burners that cost almost $1500-2000. building one would be tons cheaper.

I know it would consist of a cd-rom drive, some cd-r drives, a power supply, some type of controller card to control them and a case.

but where do i find a controller card? could i make one? its not something i can really afford to do right now, but maybe i can afford to get/attempt to build a card. the only experience i have is a little board with flashing leds i made in a tech class and some hotkeys i put together to control winamp on my computer. thank you for any help you can give me!

 

The best and cheapest way to make an affordable CD tower is using a SCSI interface. You can have up to 7 devices attached as apposed to IDE with only 4. All parts you can find on E-Bay or similar auctions or at Computer Graveyard type stores. You will want a SCSI controller card(w/external connector), 6 SCSI CD-Roms and a 1 or 2 GB SCSI hard drive, Any case that has 7 5 1/4" Drive bays( You can use any case but I prefer to try and find a real cdrom tower), and cables to connect everything. You would install the SCSI card in your current PC. In the new case you will then hook up the 6 cdroms and the HDD. You must set each device to a different SCSI ID and only terminate the last in the chaint. If the case came with a power supply ensure it is rated atleast at 350W. If it does not meet that criteria or does not have a PS you know what you need to do. Connect PC to Tower and wala. I suggest reading about SCSI devices and how to install and configure. SCSI devices come in several different types these days and if you're not sure what your buying you've just wasted money.