System Requirements to Rip/Convert Blu Ray

[minerva.thegift]

I am working on building a new system and I want to make sure I'll be able to rip and convert blu ray movies (720 and 1080) to .mkv (or some similar format) with it. Here's what I have so far:

Intel Core i7 920 (stock at 2.66Ghz, might over clock it a bit)
6GB (3X2GB) Trichannel RAM

With these, I'm not worried about not having enough CPU power or RAM; my main concern now is hard drive speed. I know some programs like Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 require (or at least strongly recommend) a minimum of two 7200RPM drives in a RAID 0 (striping) to work with HD video (according to their requirements page.) I'm wondering if I'd be OK with a Western Digital Caviar Blue (SATA 3Gb/s) series drive (7200RPM, 16MB cache) or if I'd have to get something more. I cannot find any posts anywhere online that list the hard drive requirements for ripping and converting blu ray, so I'm asking here.

As a side question, I'd like to know not only what the bare minimum requirement is but also what type of improvement I'd get with a faster drive. For example, would a 10000RPM drive or even a Solid State Disk give a noticeably faster encode time? If a nicer hard drive could cut the encoding time by a considerable amount, then it might be worthwhile to step up.

If anyone has any benchmark data or comparisons of ripping/encoding using various hard drives (either from your own testing or links to forum posts or something) please share those. Thanks!

EDIT: For what it's worth, I plan to be running Windows 7 64bit on the computer.

[johns0]

Dont worry about any benchmarks or graphs,just a newer hdd (7200rpm)that you mentioned is good enough,i wouldnt trust adobe cause you dont need raid for ripping or encoding.SSD are still too small in storage for blu-ray ripping and converting,i'm wating till ssd get bigger in size(500gb+) and cheaper,might take a couple years or so.

What you want is a second hard drive to do all your video work,1tb sata2 and higher at 7200rpm 32mb cache.

[minerva.thegift]

For now I have an external 1TB that I connect through eSATA so I plan to rip/convert them then put them off on that drive. I'm with you, I want to get a nice SSD or something but not until the prices come down. I've seen them in sizes of around 128GB and I suppose that would work for ripping/encoding but yeah, for the most part they're still too small. I'm curious if that would even make any difference in the encoding process; I just don't know what types of speeds the encoding process (through MeGUI, Clown BD, or something similar) and so I don't know if the hard drive speed could be the 'weak link' that slows things down. For all I know the hard drive speed wouldn't even be a problem, I just don't know; I've only done ripping/converting work on DVDs so this is my first adventure into the HD world.

Still, I am wondering if anyone has any experience with ripping/converting and could share what types of speeds they've had. Perhaps a more general way of putting it is this: What type of hard drive/CPU/RAM/Blu Ray Drive do you have and how long does it take you to rip and then encode a blu ray?

[minerva.thegift]

In case anyone stumbles across this thread, I thought I'd note that I have gotten Blu Ray archiving up and running with an Intel Core i7 machine with 6GB RAM and merely a 7200RPM WD Caviar (Blue, I think) 500GB drive. It seems to really pull on processor power (a thread monitor thing that I have shows all 8 threads at around 95%+) but it also tends to only use around 2-3GB of RAM (as far as I can tell.) In any case, I can't guarantee that a faster HDD might not improve the speed, but I can say that it is not a true necessity.

[creamyhorror]

HD speed is not going to be an issue at all, if you have a SATA drive. A 30Mbps input stream and an 8Mbps output stream should not be a problem for a current HD. At worst, you can put the streams on different HDs in order to minimize interference.

You can encode Blu-ray on a dual core with 2GB RAM too, but it takes a lot longer :P

[johns0]

If you are encoding 1080p at 8~25gb output in 2 hours and your 7800 rpm hdd can handle 50gb output in 10 minutes then getting a ssd will make no difference at all for hd encoding.