Two hard drives

[jonnie]

I've got around around to building my new PC, but need some advice,

Motherboard ASUS AV7V266-E
CPU AMD XP1900+
Memory 256mb
Geforce2 MX200/MX400
WD 10Gb Drive 7200rpm
Maxtor 20Gb Drive 5400rpm
LG DVD drive
HP CD RW drive
Windows 2000

What I need if some advice from those who have tried, I read in the forum a few month back a thread from someone regarding speeding up DVD2SVCD by attaching one hard drive and the CD RW on one IDE cable and the other hard drive with the DVD drive. I've searched the forum but have not been able to find the thread.

Basically you configure DVD2SVCD to rip to one drive and encode to the other or something like that ? Anybody know what I'm on about ?

Regards
John

:confused:

[UltimateDBZ]

The idea is to speed things up by having your harddrive on one cable, and the dvd on the other, so that when you are ripping (and therefore using both your dvd and harddrive) - you aren't putting such a load all on one cable. I'm not sure just how significant the speed increase is/may be, but it's a good idea to do it anyway.

[jonnie]

That makes sense, but along similar a line, what about CCE read from one drive and writing to another wouldn't that speed CCE up considerably ?

[UltimateDBZ]

No, not likely, because CCE is not held back in speed by hard drive write speeds, its by CPU speed, memory speed, and other factors. It isn't writing enough information fast enough to demand more than your hard drive can amply provide.

[mrbass]

in my tests a 7200rpm hd has no advantage over a 5400rpm hd when CCE encoding. It's almost all CPU.

[chainsaw135]

and ram also, i've use pc2100 ram and pc2700 and the 2700 worked a bit faster with the same movie and cpu then the pc2100 has...i think the #'s were 1.400 using pc2100 and 1.520 using pc2700 ect.

btw i always keep both hardrives on ide 1 and both cdrw and dvd rom on ide2 thats just how i work things seems to be the best configuration for my setup. I had raid at one time and really never used it tho now i think i might get me a raid card just because they are so cheap now and so are hardrives.

[ux-3]

@chainsaw: Got a haircut?:D

Regarding the memory, it may not have to do with the clock rate. As I told you before, in the K7s5a, different types of 2100 Ram produced different speeds, perhaps due to size of stick.

I have used two HD on different channels paired with DVD and CDRW. Point being: Max transfer speed possible except for DVD->CDRW, but in these days, I hardly do on the fly copies. Transfer is much faster!

For DVD2SVCD there is a good improvement in a few places: Audio extraction, Muxing and Authoring do speed up a lot, since here, little CPU work is required. Of course, you will have to specify working directories on different HDs to get this advantage. For the whole process, the advantage will be little, but your HDs will sure like to do less jumping.

It is nice, but not required. I would however strongly reccomend keeping one HD and the CDRW on different channels.

[chainsaw135]

Yeah i have a k7s5a and a soltek board. This test was done on the soltek board.

Do you like my new hair cut?:)

If you want total control of different ide channels, i'd recommend getting a motherboard that has 4 ide channels or buying an ide card. And doing it that way.

[UltimateDBZ]

My method to madness is using 2 identical hdd's in a RAID 0 configuration, and therefore have all 4 IDE channels available for media drives (DVD, CD-RW, future DVD+RW, etc.) - you'll also get more speed from a RAID configuration, but of course, it'll cost you a bit extra.

Just a suggestion... :)