Should (legal) DVD encoding be faster on the Air SSD drive?

[KittyKatta]

First off, this isn't about DVD copying of disks we OWN, its about SSD speed and why encoding took so long on the Air. We BOUGHT two movies for a trip and are using Handbrake on two machines as a race. One is our black friday $300 Win7 Celeron Acer and the other is our new Air 13".

Acer - Straight off DVD took 1:30
Air - Video_TS file we put right on the SSD drive took 2:15

So does anyone know why the Air lost this race? I thought the SSD would be super fast but it wasn't. And also, Im also trying with RipIt which is pretty fast but its at 1:30 now and only 85% which is slower than my old plain macbook + dvd drive.

 

[miles01110]

The bottleneck is the processor, not the hard drive.

 

[KPOM]

First off, this isn't about DVD copying of disks we OWN, its about SSD speed and why encoding took so long on the Air. We BOUGHT two movies for a trip and are using Handbrake on two machines as a race. One is our black friday $300 Win7 Celeron Acer and the other is our new Air 13".

Acer - Straight off DVD took 1:30
Air - Video_TS file we put right on the SSD drive took 2:15

So does anyone know why the Air lost this race? I thought the SSD would be super fast but it wasn't. And also, Im also trying with RipIt which is pretty fast but its at 1:30 now and only 85% which is slower than my old plain macbook + dvd drive.

Check the settings first. Are you sure you are encoding at the same quality level on both machines?

The bottleneck is the processor, not the hard drive.

True, but the one month-old Core i5 that's in the Air ought to handily beat the Atom or AMD chip that's in the $300 Black Friday netbook. A Core 2 Duo should do that much.

 

[TNTN]

Oh dear - that's embarassing!

 

[wywern209]

was ram the same across the 2 machines? plus, i don't know if handbrake is supported for multiple cores or if high clock speed matters the most.

 

[KittyKatta]

The bottleneck is the processor, not the hard drive.

Huh? The i5 is the bottleneck? I've never heard the i5 get blamed for anything regarding speed because it seemed like a very fast chip so can anyone confirm that the i5 is a worse chip for encoding than the Core2Duo?

was ram the same across the 2 machines?

Same RAM on both machines (4gb).

 

[KeithJenner]

See here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1202036/

This was converting an AVI, rather than a DVD, but I don't think that should make much difference.

I hadn't thought about memory. My Air is obviously 4gb, but the Pro was only 2gb. Maybe that makes a difference.

 

[KPOM]

Do you have Windows installed on your MacBook Air? If so, compare the two using the Windows version. Maybe the Mac version is slower? I wouldn't think so, but it's possible.

Did you have anything in the background? The Core i5 ought to be considerably faster since Handbrake is CPU intensive. The Core i5 has hyper threading, and 2 generations of CPU enhancements on the Core 2 Duo. Again, double-check the settings to make sure that you weren't encoding a higher quality image on the Air.