ripping effects on hard drive

[s]

Does frequent VCD ripping shorten a hard drive's life span? It doesn't seem that frequent creation/deletion of huge files would be harmless.

How long would it take to rip a 2 hr. DVD? I have a 1.4 GHz Thunderbird, WinMe, 256 RAM; ? Smart Ripper process took ~20 min. The tutorial mentioned 6 min, & >3 hr. for encoding, so I'm assuming encoding would be 2x longer, maybe 8 hrs? This seems to be an awfully long time -- not really worth the effort, IMO. (Didn't have enough space on my hd partition, so I didn't carry through with the ripping.)

Thanks for the help.

[Stansell]

Don't worry,

Most hard drives these days become obsolete before they wear out. Take the Tivo PVR for instance. It has standard off the shelf HD and is constantly reading/writing because it keeps a 30 minute video buffer (even when in "standby" mode). Your hard drive should handle the occasional rip/encode just fine.

Encoding can take a while if you use best quality settings. I prefer to do my encoding overnight or during the day when I am at work.