Improving speed/hard drive configuration

[GuyManDude]

I was curious about what configuration would improve speed with DVD Rebuilder. I have two hard drives, the C drive is my system drive and faster than the D drive. What settings in DVD Rebuilder would give me the best performance?

By this I mean which drive should have the source (DVD rip), working path, and output path. Is there one of these paths that it doesn't matter which drive it is on? Also assume that I will be doing some light work while DVD Rebuilder is running.

[hallway]

DVD-RB doesn't need "fast" access to the files it's working on. I've had equal success having it read directly from the DVD itself as I have after ripping the files to my hard drives.

[jptheripper]

also important is that the drives are on different buses (not sure if that is the right word). If c is your primary master, d should be the secondary master (NOT primary slave). That is a huge speed increase. Other than that i would rip to the c drive, encode (working) on d drive, rebuild back to c.

[GuyManDude]

I've had equal success having it read directly from the DVD itself as I have after ripping the files to my hard drives.

This won't work for most DVDs since you have to first get around copy protection with something like DVD Decrypter, right?

[Rippraff]

@GuyManDude
Right! :)

Cu Rippraff

[hallway]

That's not impossible to deal with. AnyDVD, for example, makes it possible as does DVD43 (???). Regardless, my point is, if DVD-RB reading and working directly off of my DVD drive is sufficient, even the slowest hard drive won't pose a problem.

Even what jptheripper says isn't relevant. When DVD-RB is reading DVD files, it doesn't appear to constantly read and write data. I don't watch the access lights of my drives, but I can hear the DVD drive spin up every minute or more while DVD-RB reads the next "chunk".

[gobama05]

Hmmm, I was thinking of trying that instead of ripping the disc to my hard drive first. But I was thinking it might wear the DVD rom drive out. But, at their low prices, I guess I could afford to try it. Was thinking of getting a new one anyways, my Liteon 166S has been used a lot :D

[jdobbs]

Hallway has had good experiences -- but reading directly from the drive can be slower. I have an 16x DVD-ROM drive -- but on my system it take about twice as long to do a DVD directly from the disc as it would if I ripped it to hard drive first.

Hard drive speed can make a considerable difference. A cached high-speed drive can cut the time down by another 25% or so.

[hallway]

@jdobbs: Are you serious about it taking twice as long when reading from the DVD ?? I by no means have a high-end system (AMD XP2500+, 1.5gb RAM, 80gb/8mb/7200 WD) and I was casually keeping track of re-encode times when I first started using your program. My times have varied, give or take 30 minutes, between all the movies I've done. Reading from the DVD or after ripping to the HDD really seemed to make no difference, at least not a substantial one.

In fact, I posed this same question when I first started using DVD-RB.... I got very few, maybe only one, response, but I don't recall what that verdict was now. Here it is: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=104807

[jdobbs]

I remember our having this discussion in another thread. I'd mentioned the same thing then. I'd warned that doing it directly from disc would be slower and you related your speeds.

Interesting that you can get such great speeds. I have two drives -- and the "twice as long" drive is the better in terms of speed of the two. My drives are an NEC burner and a standard Lite-On drive. The Lite-On is plenty fast when I just read to disc... I can normally do a full disc in about 8 minutes -- but when I run direct-from-disc it's attrociously slow.

[Rippraff]

And besides the speed discussion this is IMHO an unnecessary torture of your drive because you have access to it during the whole process.

Cu Rippraff

[Trahald]

And besides the speed discussion this is IMHO an unnecessary torture of your drive because you have access to it during the whole process.

I wouldnt characterize it as torture.. maybe with dvdit (it think it was called) which allowed you to encode straight from dvd rom back when pcs were 500mhz and things took forever to encode.. but now encode times are faster for some than playback so its not any worse 'torture' than playing the movie on your pc. reading during the process is more or less linear so just a matter of disk drive spinning (which is same for playback.)

i might try testing the diff in speed if i have some time. my system is pretty weak currently (256mb ram 2000+ and one 80mb hd) might work better for me to go from cd just to give my hd a rest from virtual memory swapping ;)

[hallway]

For what it's worth, I rip all of them to my hard drive now anyways... :) I just got a 2nd HDD, 120gb, that I'm using just for this (and related) purposes.

My typical re-encode takes around 220 minutes. The worst I've ever seen was in the 270s (minutes) or maybe 290s. I can't even say that one was a read-from-dvd job either.

[jptheripper]

hey, for what its worth, i just did a 36 HOUR encode.

:)

[jdobbs]

Now that is massive overkill (just MHO). Either you did 1000 passes, or your computer runs on steam!!!

I don't think the wear on the drive is really ever a concern to me... the guts are made for thousands of hours of playback when watching video anyway... I've never had one go bad -- mainly because they always get replaced with a faster one long before that could happen anyway. Most of them have a MTBF (meantime between failure) of around 60,000 - 100,000 hours.

[Rippraff]

Now that is massive overkill (just MHO). Either you did 1000 passes, or your computer runs on steam!!!
Or he's using heavy filtering which can slow down encoding a lot.

At the end it's up to you guys how you use your hardware. ;)
For me it's just a comparison of use of my DVD-ROM between a few minutes and several hours.

Cu Rippraff

[jptheripper]

9 pass resize and undot deen

slow 1ghz p3

upgrading int he near future..

[gobama05]

Hehhe, thanks for all the replies. I should have bought a bigger Raptor 10k rpm drive, as this is the one I use to rip my dvd's to as it is quicker. I use a 36gb Raptor now for windows and when I rip a dvd. So, I have to defrag a lot :)

[GuyManDude]

Hallway has had good experiences -- but reading directly from the drive can be slower. I have an 16x DVD-ROM drive -- but on my system it take about twice as long to do a DVD directly from the disc as it would if I ripped it to hard drive first.

Hard drive speed can make a considerable difference. A cached high-speed drive can cut the time down by another 25% or so.

So, back to my original question: which configuration would theoretically give me the best performance?

[jdobbs]

For performance the biggest factor is the processor. Almost all of the time in DVD-RB is spent encoding. So the faster the clock speed, the better. Second consideration is memory. I'd recommend 512MB to 1GB of main memory.

The last consideration is disc. I'd recommend a 7200rpm or faster drive with 8MB of cache on the drive connected to an ATA133 (or faster) bus. The smartest way to do it is to partition one section for video work -- because fragmentation is the biggest slowdown. Also remember to always stay well below the capacity of the disc. Windows acts differently when you get within about 25% of capacity and you can see dramatic slowdowns.

For those without the luxury of a separate drive or partition -- remember to defrag a lot...

If you have two drives -- rip to one and use that as the source. Then make the working/output directories on the other. If they are on different IDE buses you can get a little more speed... I usually rip in ISO mode and mount it as a virtual drive using Daemon Tools... but I think the performance is about the same if you use a file mode rip.

[GuyManDude]

I usually rip in ISO mode and mount it as a virtual drive using Daemon Tools... but I think the performance is about the same if you use a file mode rip.

What's the point of ripping in ISO mode and then mounting it as a virtual drive? There must be some benifit, or otherwise it would just add another step.

[jptheripper]

just makes sure you dont mess up the image somehow

[jdobbs]

Exactly. It also keeps the entire disc organized in a single ISO file. That's important to me since I might sometimes have 10 or 12 on my HD at a time.

[Harrysmiith]

From what you are all saying I think CPU must be the most important factor.
I have a Pentium 4 3.2 dedicated to burning, 2 sata drives, and 1 gig of ram
and yet using CCE basic my normal speed is only 2.5 X I always burn to ISO, use daemon tools to set up a virtual drive, defrag etc but the speed is never higher or lower.

[jdobbs]

Sounds like something is wrong. I get 2.5x using CCE Basic (sometimes more) on my Athlon 3200+ with a clock speed of 2.2GHz. Using CCE SP 2.50 I can get 3.0x sometimes. My system is running with 512MB of RAM on an ATA133 IDE connection to a 7200rpm hard drive.

[hallway]

Yeah, I get 2.5 easily with my Athlon XP2500+ here...

[techmule]

You might wanna look at this post :

DVD-RB conf Test (http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=61306)