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As I were not able to find a DVD-R carousel within my price range that includes a reader, I'm considering buying eight DVD-R drives and controller-card(s) for extracting data off hundreds of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. Most of my DVD-Rs are 16x or less.

I first thought that the following configuration would work, but connecting four USB 2.0 drives to one USB 2.0/3.0 hub would limit the speed, as the design of hubs in general will have a total capacity of one USB 2.0 port.

What hardware configuration would have an optimal speed to extract all drives at the same time in good speed?

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Joachim Bratteli
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    Avoid USB for this kind of thing, as it's way too slow. USB is not going to be fast enough to transfer from 8 DVDs at a time. In fact, USB is barely fast enough to read data from a single DVD at full speed, so you won't get any speed advantage by reading from multiple disks at the same time. Instead, I'd recommend some sort of automated solution, like you asked for in your other question. I'm pretty sure there is a cheaper solution than the Digistore Solutions device you mentioned. – Jonas Czech Jan 07 '16 at 10:59
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    Thanks for valuable information. I agree with you @jonascz that an automated solution would be the best, but placing eight dvds in three times a day would get me to about 100 discs in four days. I guess the speed of transfer would not be that important when I think of it. Still. I could put in more discs a day if the speed of transfer would have been better. I have limited space in my cabinet (4 bays) so I started considering an external solution. With your information I think that a combination would do better if the SATA controller could handle the traffic of four DVDs and transfer to disk. – Joachim Bratteli Jan 07 '16 at 11:36
  • Yes, SATA would be better, or eSata maybe. USB 3 would also work, if you can find cheap usb3 external DVD drives. – Jonas Czech Jan 07 '16 at 12:31
  • Wouldn't it work to use USB2 devices on a USB3 HUB? The USB3 bus should support 5Gbps and eight DVD-R 24x drives would only need 8 * 0.266 Gbps (24x = 24 * 1,385,000 * 8 bps = 265,920,000 bps) = ~2.1Gbps which is less than half the bandwidth. I guess I'm missing something. – Joachim Bratteli Jan 07 '16 at 22:18
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    Yes, that might work, I'm not sure though if multiple USB 2 devices on a USB3 port would actually get full USB 3 speed. You'd need to check that. Anyway, you would need USB 3 hubs, and the ones you linked are not USB 3. I've never done anything like this though. – Jonas Czech Jan 07 '16 at 23:07
  • I was missing something. Seems like the design of USB3 hubs in general limits the speed for USB2 devices to USB2 max: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hub#Speed_of_USB_3.0_Hubs_with_USB_2.0_Devices_connected – Joachim Bratteli Jan 08 '16 at 04:05

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