Looking for information on how hard drive speeds effect encoding...

[Dustin013]

I am trying to build a little box just for encoding... I am looking for some documentation on how hard drive speeds might effect encoding...

7200RPM, 10000RPM, Solid state drives?

Here is what I was thinking about building, minus the hard drive of course until I decide which one...

1) Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Quad-Core Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115017

2) G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115017

3) GIGABYTE GA-G31M-S2L LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128078

4) Rosewill R604TBLK-N 120mm Fan ATX Mid Tower Computer Case+450W Power Supply
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147030

I have two extra 7200RPM 750GB drives I could use but if having a better hard drive makes a huge difference I would be willing to purchase that as well.

Ok so above are the power supply and case, a Quad Core Processor, 4GB RAM and of course the motherboard.

The above box without the hard drive will only cost $410ish through newegg.com. I have a budget of around $800-$900ish I would like to spend on this machine. I am really just ripping my DVD collection into MP4 format for my IPhone using FFMPEG.

I would love to hear some feedback on the solution above. I know this is the place to ask for solid feedback so any suggestions, comments and/or criticism is encouraged!

With that being said, since my budget is only 1/2 way to being used up with the setup above, I "believe" (I could very well be wrong, so please correct me if I am) it would be "faster" to get two of the above boxes verse just spending the entire budget on a beefed up solution. Is that correct?

Thanks again in advance!

[Sharktooth]

Theoretically the hard drive is not a limit since it's many time faster than the speed needed by the bitrate used in DVDs and blurays.
however a fragmented disk may be a problem. also multiple programs accessing the same disk may degrade performance.
so, having a second dedicated disk drive (keeping it defragmented) will eliminate all the possible problems.

[rebkell]

Get a good DVD drive, the majority of your time will be babysitting the DVD data to the hard drive, the faster you can move it over the less babysitting you have to do getting data to the hard drive to encode.

[Dark Shikari]

Hard drives are only a limitation if you're encoding at very fast settings from a very large lossless input file (rather than from a compressed source, like MPEG-2).

[Dustin013]

Thanks for the feedback guys! With the DVDs I always rip them as ISOs so I don't really need a super DVD drive... Since the DVD ISO will be read from the hard drive will this make a difference?

[Shinigami-Sama]

Thanks for the feedback guys! With the DVDs I always rip them as ISOs so I don't really need a super DVD drive... Since the DVD ISO will be read from the hard drive will this make a difference?

thats where most of the time you can shave off will being going to
ripping the ISO.

harddrive speed doesn't matter untill you get into insane bitrates from lossless encodes

so getting a faster DVD Drive would be where you could gain the most time

[Ranguvar]

Thanks for the feedback guys! With the DVDs I always rip them as ISOs so I don't really need a super DVD drive... Since the DVD ISO will be read from the hard drive will this make a difference?
Shouldn't. I don't believe there's any MPEG-2 decoder that can, even on the fastest PCs, decode video fast enough to choke a 7,200rpm or higher hard drive.

[fields_g]

I see you chose a motherboard with integrated video. Good choice budget-wise and has no effect on encoding in x264....except... if you use Avisynth scripts that include FFT3DGPU for noise reduction. Integrated will work, but a you will have a performance hit. I currently have a C2D laptop with a Radeon x1400 GPU and my CPU is doing a lot of nothing while waiting for my GPU to get done processing. I guess this is a reason to use more insane x264 setting to give my CPU something to do! Other GPU accelerated programs that might come along will also suffer. Anyway... might not be a big deal, but something to consider when parting out a system.

[Sharktooth]

you may want to consider a radeon 4850. it has enough raw power (1TFLOP) to run any GPU accelerated stuff at insane speed...also it's really good for gaming, it supports Stream Computing and the price is not so mindblowing (199$).
if you dont like ati, at the same price you can get a 8800GT that has much less raw performance but is good enough for the same purpouse, also it supports CUDA (the equivalent of AMD/ATi Stream but seems more supported) and actually (with the latest drivers) even PhysiX acceleration.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Yup, adding a discrete GPU is a fantastic upgrade for anyone who encodes video.

Realtime fft3dgpu (even 2-3 instances) on a 1080p encode is 100% possible with a basic modern GPU. Compare that to a couple fps for the software only version - and the advantage is obvious ;)

~MiSfit