Methinks a new HD is in order

[LoH]

Just looking for an opinion.

I'm looking at a 120GB 7200rpm SATA drive (8MB) cache.

I have three IDE 8GB hard drives currently.

I believe the HD is my bottleneck -- I'm just wondering how much encoding speed I'll garner from relieving this bottleneck.

Don't need absolute times -- guesses of percentages is plenty.

[Piccoro]

8gb...Are they even 5400RPM?
I bet you will shed a lot of encoding time off just buy getting a IDE 7200rpm drive. Serial is even better if you have a serial ATA controller.

[bugster]

Actually, the speed of the HD has VERY little impact on the encoding time. The extra space will be a bonus though

[Solarjetman]

Yep, the bottleneck for encoding is CPU power in almost all cases. However, you would get better capture performance if you need it by getting a new hard drive. But, judging by the fact you only have 8Gig drives, you probably capture straight to mpeg anyway. In that case it doesn't matter much.