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View Full Version : Ramdisk Ripping & Encoding

clixco
19th October 2010, 15:54
My faithful PC that I've had for 3 years has started falling apart. It's served me well, but it's time for a hardware refresh. It's also time to rip my DVD collection. I'm thinking about doing something that may be extravagant. I'd like to know if it's worthwhile.

It looks to me like it's possible to get a system with ~24G of RAM without getting into server motherboard (ie stupid expensive) territory. The thought would be to create one or more large (8-10G) RAMdisks and rip and/or encode to them. There's a couple hundred DVDs involved, so even moderate time savings would make a difference over the life of the project.

Has anyone experimented with this? Does ripping and/or encoding entirely in RAM make a difference?
stax76
19th October 2010, 17:49
A fast drive don't help with ripping because the DVD/Blu-ray drive is slower then every hard drive, it would help mostly with demuxing and indexing, a SSD or regular drives with RAID 0 would probably make more sense. Indexing or demuxing a DVD takes only a minute with a normal drive however and it's not absolutely necessary to demux and index, a DVD can be ripped with MakeMKV and the MKV file can be opened directly with DirectShowSource.
CpT
19th October 2010, 18:20
I agree with stax76.

I used to run the program below. It was fast as hell but frankly was only helpful for a very small part of the encoding process.
http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

I've since switched back to using a 4 disk raid 0 array for apps/os/encoding ect then an additional 4 disk raid 5 array for decent performance and storage.
Indexing and or demuxing is extremely fast on a raid 0 setup and building a raid array would prolly be cheaper than 24gb of ram.

The only thing that was really amazing about the ramdisk was when installing firefox and chrome on it, then setting it up to be the chrome/firefox default cache + cookie location.
Using it for the os page file is helpful as well. But frankly it considering how few uses I had for the ramdisk buying another 12gb just wasn't worth it, for me anyway.
AnonCrow
21st October 2010, 16:58
If you're considering spending money on 24 GB of RAM, then certainly buying a 7 or 14 drive DVD-tower (fibre, e-sata or 1/10 Gbit LAN) or an automated dvd-carousel wouldn't sound like a huge investment. Or even renting one for however long you need it for.