External HD or Internal HD for files

[nathug]

Lately I have been encoding from and back to a 250gb WD Passport hard drive attached to my MacBook (which is 1 1/2 years old) via USB. Today I did 2 encodings where the files went to and from the internal HD on my Mac which were located on my desktop. So far it looks like the encoding from the internal HD are going almost twice as fast. I'm using Snapshot Build 5.

Anyone getting the same results, or know why this could be?

Nathan

[ssj2_goha]

It really depends on how your external is connected. USB is sloooooooow, firewire 400 is fast, firewire 800 is amazingly fast. So that is a big contributing factor. Is your internal PATA or SATA? Also a factor.
Basically we need more information.
<edit>
Wow I should re-read stuff....

OK the usb is slow, macbook has SATA so yeah internal would be faster, you would notice a difference if you got a firewire drive, 400 is all you have I think.

[nathug]

Yeh, my Lacie PSU for my Firewire diver blowup, I'm waiting for a replacement. I didn't know if it mattered for HB, drive speed vs encoding speed etc.

Nate

[ssj2_goha]

it's how fast data can be writen to the drive.

[nathug]

Yes, but at what point does it not matter to have a faster drive? Basically can HB's encoding speed get better from a USB to a Firewire 400 to 800 to whatever. There must be a point it no longer matters, right.

Nate

[ssj2_goha]

Basically you have to look at how much information is being written and how fast it is being written.
USB Writes in packets at the speed of 480 Mbits/s (usb 2.0) or 12 Mbits/s (usb 1.1)
Firewire Writes data as a continuous stream of 400 Mbits/s (firewire 400) or 786.432 Mbits/s (firewire 800)
SATA come in two forms, 1.5 Gbits/s and 3.0 Gbits/s, your macbook uses a 1.5 Gbits/s Connection.


If Handbrake is trying to write data faster than that rate it will have to slow down to give the drive time to write it.
Before when computer cpus were slower it was as big a deal, now it is.

[Cavalicious]

I've been writing directly to an USB 2.0 external for a year now. So this isn't an issue.

...and HB isn't going to write now where near that fast to a HD regardless of internal or external.

[dynaflash]

Just a thought on external drives and macbooks.
I have found a speed increase when I have my source drive on my fw800 bus, and my destination drive on my fw 400 bus. So, the mbp is running HB and reading from the fw800 drive and writing to the fw400 drive. I have found this faster than reading from and writing to the mbp's 5400 rpm internal drive alone. Placebo effect ? Maybe but I have borne it out in testing. Just my .02.

[TedJ]

I doubt it's a placebo effect. While the overall throughput on even a 5400 rpm drive should be adequate, the constant seeking will definitely add some overhead. Where possible, I never have the source and destination files on the same drive.

[dynaflash]

right, having said that, the advantage is maginified of course on faster encodes. Like the classic preset where the encoding is really fast you are more likely to run into I/O bottlenecks.

BTW, love the sig TedJ

[Cavalicious]

BTW, love the sig TedJ

I don't...