RAID 0 increases CCE encoding speed?

[Trimegisto]

Hi,

I have two IDE HD, a IBM Deskstar 40 Gb 7200 rpm and a Seagate 20 Gb 5400 rpm.

I'm thinking of setting up a RAID 0 striped volume in the following manner:

Primary master the 40 Gb HD with 3 partitions, one of 10 Gb for the OS (XP Pro), one of another 10 Gb for work related stuff and leave 20 Gb empty.

Secundary Master the 20 Gb with a single empty partition.

Then create a striped volume of 40 Gb made out of the 20 Gb from the first drive and the other 20 Gb.

Is this a good idea to increase CCE speed? I'm currently encoding at max 1.2 to 1.4 fps depending on the filters aplied.

Should I place the ripped vob files in the same volume as the destination mpv files? Or is it better to place the source and the destination in different drives?

Any ideas? Advices? Experiences to share?

Thank you!

[tonyp12]

Read this thread:
http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=347414

They do not recommend RAID, and it will probably not do anything
for the CCE encoding as your HD is not the bottleneck.

[The village idiot]

Raid with mixed speed drives might be a headache! Also mixed size drives too. Also raid with the OS on a different partition (non-raid) of one of the drives would not be a good idea, remember the swap file (virtual memory, or page file) and TEMP file?

[Thorn]

If you watch your HDD light and the cpu meter while encoding, you'll see that the CPU is almost always at 100%, but the HDD flickers on and off... so a faster cpu would help. Maybe more ram, if you're only at 256MB. It is usually a dood practice to have source and destination files on different drives if all other factors are equal, but it won't make much of a difference in this circumstance.

[Vapor]

I think we've got carried away here with the HD performance thing.

The speed of HD is rarely going to impact on encodes.

Lets take a heavy theoretical encode and do the math then

5 gig vob file source of a 2 hour movie.
3x800meg SVCD output.
Total data to read and write 7.4gb = 7577.6mb

Lets go wild and say we have an uber fast PC which can manage 4x realtime encoding

So 7577.6 meg of data to read and write in 30 mins:
7577.6 / 30mins / 60secs per min = 4.2mb of data to read and write per second.

Every the current range of poxy 5400rpm drives around can manage that fellas, even with the source and destination files on the same drive.

Basically unless you have a monster PC and are working with massive uncompressed or mjpeg source your HD is not the bottleneck.