DVDFab I/O usage

[TCMilkman]

I am looking at ways to improve performance/speed of DVDFab. My system has a bunch of extra RAM and I was considering creating a RAMDisk to help with DVDFab activities and wondering where I could put a RAMDisk to work. My primary two tasks are...

A) Creating ISOs of home DVDs
B) Ripping ISOs to smaller formats (MPEGs etc)

I don't know if I understand where the heavy I/O is on either task. For either task, what is the biggest user of I/O to disk:
* source,
* target,
* work/temp area,
* some combination of the above

Assuming it is source or target, I also would need to either pre-load the source, or copy off the target after the fact, which adds to the overall time. If I could figure out the command line, I could do all this (pre-load, convert, copy, repeat) and set it and forget it.

[martythebrit]

You're grabbing at straws here. You don't give any spec's for your system. The best way to increase speed is a faster Intel CPU with Quick Sync, or a really fast NVidia graphics card with CUDA. If your asking about a speed increase my guess is you have an older computer, which unfortunately will never run DVDFab really fast.

[TCMilkman]

Sorry for not providing specifics...I didn't think it was relevant to asking about what part of tasks take the most I/O to disk. Mainly asking about I/O tasks as it relates to ISO creation and ripping. I would like to start using a RAMDisk for the heaviest I/O of certain tasks.

For general stats of my machine...
Intel 4770
32Gb 1600MHz RAM
GTX660

"Fast" is relative, of course, but I think the system will do. As mentioned, what I do have a bunch of RAM, which is not otherwise heavily used by DVDFab. If I converted 16Gb of that to a RAMDisk (which is MUCH faster than regular drives), and leveraged that in my heavy I/O DVDFab tasks, it could potentially do the work that much quicker.

I am planning on testing out various methods to see what speed benefits will be, but the highest benefit will probably be where the I/O is the heaviest. So I was attempting to get some input on where I should start that testing.

In the long run, it would be nice if DVDFab could potentially leverage some extra system RAM for speed (temporary write/buffer) purposes. I love that they added the CUDA support, and this would be more in that same line.

Until I can ask for an MPEG from an ISO file and get it a second later, there is always "faster". ;-)

[martythebrit]

The main bottleneck is the CPU, a RAM disk isn't going to help you.

Do you have Quick Sync configured? If you do conversions will be blazing fast.

[signals]

What about your optical drive? With later generation i7 CPUs, the optical drive read speed is the main bottleneck in the Copy modes and in Ripper mode as well if you make the conversions from the original disc. Try copying the Main Movie to an external (eSATA or USB 3.0) hard drive to see some speed improvement.

[Toccatta]

Wow, two answers, and still nobody seems to have read the intent of your actual question... so I'll give it a try.

You still haven't given any really useful information related to your question. It's ironic that you're upset that the answers you've gotten have nothing to do with disk I/O, while the information you've provided also has nothing to do with I/O.

What hard drives do you have in your system? Are you using an SSD or a HDD (or both) and is the HDD SATA 2 (3.0GB/sec) or SATA 3 (6.0GB/sec) - don't you just hate how hard drive and motherboard marketing departments like to refer to SATA 3.0 GB/sec to intentionally confuse the issue whether they're talking about SATA 3 or not?

For creating .iso files, the BIGGEST issue of I/O isn't the input or the output, but the crosstalk between them. By default, the temp files are stored on your system disk, and if you're writing the .iso file to the same disk, then you're getting a lot of crosstalk between the reading and the writing to the same place (assuming you have a physical HDD with read/write heads - crosstalk with SSD is virtually negligible) The biggest thing you could do to improve .iso creation speed is to ensure that the temp files and the destination directory are on seperate physical drives (not to be confused with separate logical drives, which won't help if it's the same physical drive).

That won't help much with converting .iso files to mpegs, as there really isn't any temp directory. However, to improve I/O speed, you should put the source on your fastest drive, since DVDFab is reading far more information than it's writing, particularly if you're going from full DVD quality to a lower bitrate .mp4 file.

When creating the .iso file, you should configure your temp file to reside on the ram disk, ensuring no crosstalk between reading and writing, and making certain that the processor is able to get the data as fast as it's able to take it in.

When creating .mp4 files from .iso images, place the original .iso images onto the ram disk. There's no chance of crosstalk, but you'll still want the CPU to get the source info as fast as it can take it in. The output will never be more than the input (unless you're doing something VERY wrong) so always keep the source files on the ram disk.

Of course... none of the above will have anything to do with how fast DVDFab can actually convert one format to another, but then that isn't what you were asking, unless I read your question completely wrong.

[glenns]

If you make the conversions from the original disc lightning shrink can be used and speed things way up so optical drive may not be so slow.

[martythebrit]

'crosstalk' and moving temp files. Okay. If you want speed increases that you can measure with benchmarks, knock yourself out with RAM disks and moving temp files. In the real world you're not going to notice the difference, unless your computer is from 1998.

It never ceases to amaze me how people thing stuff we did 15 - 20 years ago is still relevant today.