I want to rip my DVDs and Blue Rays for plex, I know how but I want to speed the process up using VMs. I have a CPU, Ram, and multiple DVD/ Blue Ray Dives on my rig. The bottle neck being not enough drives for them to write to. Blue Rays have a very high bit rate and I do not want to lose any quality. If I have the VMs on multiple Ram drives I believe that would provide plenty of speed for recording, then copy the files from the ram drive.
Has anyone done anything like this and can tell me how they did it? Or how to set up ram disks. I just need a push in the right direction.
your hardest part is going to be the cpu since you will have to encode multiple disks at a time.
a ram disk wouldn't do much because you would have to commit the files to disk anyway
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OK, i understand that having old HDD and two write streams to it might be annoying if you do something else on that comp. But the quality of encoding or coping (re)encoded media is not affected by write speeds (e.g. it is not just like Skype or Hangout) .
May I ask what you are using to encode those BRs?
Unless you are rocking an ancient IDE drive, you will be CPU bound more than IO bound. I have ripped my entire DVD/BlueRay library to my Nas. Even using my 16-core server I could not saturate the IO of a cheap SATA hard dive.
As for using VMs to speed up the process, they will just slow you down. The overhead involved in virtual machines wont make it worth it, and you may even lose the hardware h.264 encoding capability of your system.
A harddrive can easily cope with multiple blu-ray drives, even if a spinning rust harddrive.
having multiple VMs running ram drives and what not will at best shave of 2 seconds of your rendering time even if ripping multiple discs(and this is volatile storage....so NOT ADVICEABLE).
"High" bit rate means ~20-25gb rendered data, your harddrive can more then likely handle that with out even sneezing in the time it takes your cpu to render/compress the movie, or even the BR-drive to copy the raw data.
most likely you can have 2-3 BR drives copy their raw data directly onto a single harddrive(e.g. no rendering), and it would still keep up fine.
a normal spinnig rust harddrive is what? 100-160mb/s, now time that by 3600 and you have the amount of data your harddrive can handle in a hour(e.g. 10^2*3600=36gb approx worst case) of non compressed data.
Your bottleneck is your CPU most likely when you compress the content to 264, or deffinetly if your compressing to 265.
p.s.
according to wikipedia 1x BR-drive is approx 4,5mb/s so unless you got a SERIOUS threaded cpu, and a set of 20x BR drives, your biggest enemy is search time on the file system but at 4,5mb/s * which ever multiplexer * number of drives, you're golden with spinning rust.
Back when I was recording gameplay and my HDD's werent fast enough to keep up with the write's I use a program called Primo Cache (https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-ramdisk/download.html) as a ram disk because it had a delay write ability. I don't know if it still has that feature though. I believe you were able to set up more than 1 cache though so you might be able to setup 2 caches 1 per dvd ripping client, but you would have to manage which ramdisk each client is sending data to manually.
Edit: I'll echo some of the other comments, there should be no reason to run vm's since they will just add overhead to the problem.
First of all: Do you plan to do a transcode of your DVD/BD media into something else? If you do, the others are correct and your HDD is not gonna be the bottleneck. If you don't ... it might be. Anyway, quality won't be affected. So my advice is: just start. Don't overthink it, you will spend more time setting all that VM stuff up than actually using it.