Handbrake and SSD

[rayward]

It is my understanding that encoding in Handbrake is not RAM-intensive, but it is CPU-intensive. Presumably, therefore, it is pulling and dumping data off the hard drive as it goes with little buffering in RAM.

If that's the correct understanding, and on the given that I am going to upgrade my iMac now that the refresh has arrived, is it worth going to the SSD option? The theory being that access times will be much faster from the SSD than the HDD, so that will further speed up encode times.

I would appreciate some comments from those who understand what hardware is used the most intensively by Handbrake. TIA.

 

[waw74]

duplicating a 4 GB disk image file on my macbook pro (that's about 2 years old) was estimated to take 7 minutes. a file that's equivalent to a standard tv show (about 300 MB) took less than 30 seconds.

If your processor can re-encode a show in less than 30 seconds, you might see an improvement with a SSD.

 

[DoFoT9]

OP: handbrake is indeed a VERY CPU intensive program.

when ripping, i will see ~700% usage on my i7 iMac, about 400MB RAM usage, and ONLY ~5MB/s of disk activity.

this CLEARLY indicates that the CPU is the limitation here, and upgrading to a SSD will not help in any way, shape, or form.

 

[rayward]

Thanks chaps. i7 it is.

 

[DoFoT9]

Thanks chaps. i7 it is.

ok. if you are doing solely handbrake encoding just beware that HT WILL effect overall performance for singular tasks like that. i feel as though you would get a tiny bit more performance from the similarly clockde i5 - too bad its not the same clock then eh?