Very quick question...

[iamtrout]

I've got two DVD drives and they're ripping at the same time onto the same hard drive. Is this really bad? Both rip speeds are very good (10x).

 

[Duvie]

Seems like the potential for a bottleneck, but in actuality the HDD is just writing and the dvd-rom is reading. That in the fact the HDD will be able to write at many times the speed the dvd is ripping at. So the DVD ripping cannot overwhelm the HDD. As long as each DVD drive is on its own channel and the HDD as well I dont see that being a bottleneck...

 

[VirtualLarry]

This is a single HD? What brand/model, and what filesystem type are you using, and how much RAM is in the machine? That's pretty stellar write performance, given the overhead of the seeks involved to write two streams to two different places.

I've done similar things with CDs at 8x speed (~1.2MB/sec).. but dual 10x DVD rip speeds? That's quite amazing. No matter how high a HD's write transfer rate is, if you start to write to two different places on the drive, requiring seeks, it usually dramatically lowers the sustained transfer rate of each stream to the drive.

 

[iamtrout]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
This is a single HD? What brand/model, and what filesystem type are you using, and how much RAM is in the machine? That's pretty stellar write performance, given the overhead of the seeks involved to write two streams to two different places.

I've done similar things with CDs at 8x speed (~1.2MB/sec).. but dual 10x DVD rip speeds? That's quite amazing. No matter how high a HD's write transfer rate is, if you start to write to two different places on the drive, requiring seeks, it usually dramatically lowers the sustained transfer rate of each stream to the drive.

Aye, that's what I was thinking, and apparently it's correct. The seeks in different places eventually messed things up. One of the drives just stopped reading while the other one kept on going.

And yes, it's a single 160GB Maxtor 7200RPM 8MB Cache IDE hard drive, using NTFS, with 1GB RAM.

 

[bocamojo]

Seems to me like you may need to add another hard drive. Then, you would have no problems with ripping 2 CDs/DVDs at a time.

 

[Vegito]

i rip 4-6.. server on network using gigabit, but the server itself has 2 dvd drives and my 2 desktop has 2 each also.. I had no problem using all 3 pc and all 6 drives.. but then again, my server has 6 146gb raid 5 scsi drives.. a lot different than an ide setup

 

[Jeff7181]

Is it bad? No. Why would it be bad? It won't get confused and mix data from each DVD with the other.

 

[Zepper]

If you have your HD and optical drive caching optimized, that will help a lot toward that seemingly excellent performance.

.bh.

 

[Baked]

Damn, why didn't I think of that? Ripping 2 DVDs at the same time! Oh that's right, I'm not on blockbuster's rent all you want plan.

If you can rip each at 10x simultaneously, then you have no problem.