bah delete please

Just to add...if you really want to see 100% straight across then go here and help with folding > http://club.cdfreaks.com/f135/

When I first started using DVDFab I was on a single core 3500+(2.2ghz) with a single ATA HDD on an IDE cable in a Compaq. I only do movies though, so I will explain my experience with the use of DVD Shrink. My encoding data rates were about 8-10MB/s.

I thought about how I could speed it up, so I added in an old ATA HDD I had from a computer whose board eventually fried. Doing that increased my rates by more than double to about 20-25MB/s.

Later, I found a RAID hack for XP Pro(another story for another time) and decided to upgrade my drives and put the old ones into another computer to do the same. Having found SATA connections on my motherboard, I bought two nice 320GB Seagates. Buying such a large drive I had the intentions of doing the following: I transfered my Windows install to one new drive via included software then I used a bootable disc wizard to unallocate freespace leaving about 45GBs on the end of the HDD. In Windows I created a new virtual drive for movie files.

I mirrored the Windows drive which left the same 45GBs on the other HDD. Now I have RAID-0 which keeps all my files safe in case of a crash. Also, I have two virtual drives on separate HDD for my movies.

I backup my DVD files to one drive on one HDD and then convert to disc images onto another drive on the other HDD - all-the-while I have a RAID-0 for my Windows and all my music and programs, but since the movie files are on virtual drives which are not under RAID control there is no "doubling-up" of data which comes from the writing to two HDD simultaneously and thus slower rates in some cases depending on your file size, drives, board, processor and RAID controller.

I would post up a picture of disk manager with my setup, but I am on my laptop right now and am about to go to bed. If you wish to see it, let me know and I will repost it later.

Upon doing that, my rates went up another 50-60% to about 30-35MB/s. I believe this is mostly due to the fact that the motherboard is cheap and only supports SATA-I which is a theoretical 150MB/s - though the Seagate Barracudas I got support SATA-II which is 300MB/s. Good thing to have for future compatibility with a better setup.

Once last note, for Christmas I got a Dual core 4200+(2 x 2.2ghz) sadly about as fast as I can get with this 939 socket until I build a new one. When I dropped that baby in there my analyzing time cut about in half under DVD Shrink, at 100% on BOTH cores. At the same time, the data rates went up slightly to 35-40MB/s with peaks at close to 50 sometimes.

Ultimately, the processor upgrade gave me the most gain in terms of analyzing because it cut time from about 10-15 minutes down to 5-10 when I run deep analysis. However, it gave me no real gain in terms of data rates by converting file types from dvd files into disc images(.iso).

Your hardware setup is your bottleneck for this particular conversion. Basically its like this: Is it easier for you to read a book and copy what you read - Or is it easier for someone to read to you while you copy it down? Either you can jump back and forth a sentence at a time and take forever, or you can concentrate on one thing while someone else concentrates on the other and together can get it done in half the time by working steadily.

Either your one drive can read and write slowly, or you can get it a buddy and each can do one thing much faster. Make sense?

You don't have to run RAID - just through another drive in there and be done like I did at first. Or if you want to run RAID, do as I did later - get some big drives but create some space on there for virtual drives so you can still get performance of transfering data between physical drives but without the lag of the RAID double writing.

Here is the pic. I run a high resolution and didn't want to mess with rearranging all my icons and dropping it to take a good pic. So basically it looks crappy - but you should get the idea.

RAID: Redundent, Array of Inexpensive Drives. I use it on my 400GB HDD drives! Kinda nice to have over 1TB of storage! I agree it may make his system faster!

When not encoding, I use my PC for Rosetta@home, which is similar to the folding program, but thanks anyway.

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I did a new test today with 37 processes running, 2.4 GB RAM free and I noticed that while encoding, my harddrive is constantly reading at 10MB/second (it seems thats the "max"). CPU is still low and memory aswell.

So I think the harddrive is the bottleneck afterall!

yeppers It's a bottleneck somewhere and you won't use 100% unless you run Rosetta@home or some CPU + RAM stress test.

I just recently upgraded my system and everything seems to run very quickly. I'll run a few tests and post some numbers later this week.

System specs in sig line