Is encoding ur file unto another HDD faster?

[jones24]

Let's say u have 2 seperate HDDS one is called A and the other B.

Do u think it's faster to encode the output file to B if the file is saved in hdd A?

Or is it the same encoding and saving the output file unto the same HDD where the original file is saved.

[poisondeathray]

No, (or very marginally)

Disk I/O is not the bottleneck in encoding

Unless you are dealing with huge bitrates those like uncompressed files, and your HD is slow /fragged and is the bottleneck, there will be neglible impact on speed

Consider this: your average HD can transfer R/W at ~50-80MB/s . That is 400-640Mbit/s . Notice the megabit vs megabyte difference. When you encode, say a 1080p movie, using h.264, you might get realtime ~24fps (probably less) if you have a fast system. If you use an average bitrate of 20Mbit/s, you are well under the transfer rates of your average HD.

[TimA-C]

From personal experience, I'd say yes - you can't be reading and writing to the same disk at the same time! How much of a boost will depend on a load of other factors, but on both my 1st generation AMD dual-core system and my current Intel quad-core system you can easily tell if you didn't set the output directory to another physical drive when doing most kinds of processing. (e.g. Mpeg2 to Xvid for mp3/4 player, simple VHS capture and tweaking using TMPGenc XPress 4 and CCE Basic from simple avisynth scripts, DVD authoring mainly with TMPGenc DVD Works 4, etc.)

[Cornucopia]

I'd say YES also.

But it depends alot upon the encoding type, framesizes, hd read/write/access times (for both drives), and CPU capabilities. It's really a matter of: Is how long it takes to Decode+Process+Encode (in whatever formats) a frame LONGER THAN how long it takes to FetchIntoMemory+WriteToFile. Each of these steps can be manipulated to make IT not the bottleneck.

I can attest to seeing MARKED IMPROVEMENT when using separate drives, whether it's DVD copying/encoding/shrinking, capturing & NLE editing work, even some light compositing and 3D/CGI work (although, if you do much here, the processing time is many degrees greater than the time in the read/write pipeline).

Scott

[tomlee59]

Generally speaking, the answer is yes, you will see faster results if you read from one, write to the other. The reason is the overhead taken in seeking on a hard drive. Repositioning the heads is a slow operation, and will become the dominant bottleneck.

Having large, contiguous free blocks on the target drive is a must for high speed. And the source file should have been laid down contiguously as well. The less you require the hard drive to perform seeks, the faster things will go. Electronics, fast; mechanicals, slow.

[jagabo]

I agree with poisondeathray -- the gains are minimal unless you're working with only lightly compressed, or uncompressed, video and are doing minimal processing. Going from DVD to Xvid there might be a few seconds difference over an hour long encode. Going from DV AVI to DVD MPEG 2 might show 30 seconds difference over an hour of encoding. Going from uncompressed RGB to uncompressed RGB might show a 10 fold difference -- more because of the seek times than because of the read/write rates.

[poisondeathray]

Actually everyone is correct, but just a bit of background: the op, jones24 started a few threads yesterday on the same topic, basically how to re-encode a 1080p 9GB MKV rip using x264, complaining about speed.

So for his specific situation, the gains will be negligible, and although his post in this thread was phrased in general terms, I believe he really is looking for information on his specific situation

For other tasks you can see a definite improvement in some scenarios (e.g. NLE scratch disks), disk copying where you are I/O limited.