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Topic: Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed? (Read 4863 times) previous topic - next topic
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Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

That question came to mind when I had to rip an album in EAC's secure mode. To the primary hard drive? 12 - 15 minutes. An external USB 2.0 capable hard drive? Double that time. Ripping it a couple more times to both locations produced the same results. I don't get it. I wouldn't think that a location of a hard drive would impact ripping speed. Especially when USB 2.0 is in play. Haven't been able to find any documentation here when it comes to something like this.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #1 –
USB 2.0 is very slow

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: JapanAudio on
USB 2.0 is very slow


But an external USB 2.0 hard drive is still faster than any optical drive.

Even ripping at 48x that's 7.2 MB per second.

An external USB 2.0 hard drive can write at 10 MB per second and read at 20 MB per second.



Now where things will really slow down is if BOTH the optical drive that is doing the ripping, and the hard drive that is being written to are BOTH USB 2.0.  The USB 2.0 bus will then most likely get saturated.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #3 –
I don't really care about the numbers, if he changed only the drive and transfers are slower, it means that the new drive is a bottleneck.

USB devices are slow, and it probably has something to do with caching.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: RazorBoy143 on
That question came to mind when I had to rip an album in EAC's secure mode. To the primary hard drive? 12 - 15 minutes. An external USB 2.0 capable hard drive? Double that time. Ripping it a couple more times to both locations produced the same results. I don't get it. I wouldn't think that a location of a hard drive would impact ripping speed. Especially when USB 2.0 is in play. Haven't been able to find any documentation here when it comes to something like this.

You should check the transfer rate outside of EAC, for example by copying files.

If the transfer rate is normal (at least around 10 MB/s), then the problem is somewhere else.

Also, which motherboard do you have?

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: JapanAudio on
USB 2.0 is very slow


Compared to what?

The actual Truth is the exact opposite - USB 2.0 is very fast compared to the usual speeds that CD ROMs rip audio CDs. So fast that it doesn't matter whether the optical drive or hard drive interfaces are USB 2.0, USB 3.0, Fi rewire, PATA, SATA, or any of the zillions of flavors of SCSI.  The OP essentially just confirmed this fact.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: WonderSlug on
Quote from: JapanAudio on
USB 2.0 is very slow


But an external USB 2.0 hard drive is still faster than any optical drive.

Even ripping at 48x that's 7.2 MB per second.


Right. 7.8 MB/sec is a cakewalk for USB 2.0. 

Quote
An external USB 2.0 hard drive can write at 10 MB per second and read at 20 MB per second.


If you have a good modern hard drive, USB 2.0 has been observed doing far better than that!

Quote
Now where things will really slow down is if BOTH the optical drive that is doing the ripping, and the hard drive that is being written to are BOTH USB 2.0.  The USB 2.0 bus will then most likely get saturated.


Not necessarily. The basic bottleneck in this setup is most likely the he optical drive's ability to rip audio CDs.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #7 –
One big issue is the total USB load.    Is the cd drive also on usb?  Is wav being written, then read back in for encoding to FLAC and written? Any additional I/O involved in a secure rip?  Internet access or printing?

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #8 –
Could it be that the CD-ROM drive is operating in PIO mode which might cause problems when writing/reading to/from USB devices? I also recall some problem with certain Gigabyte mainboards that internal devices switched from UDMA to PIO or even caused a BSOD when transferring data over USB.

Edit: Oh, and USB is able of doing more than only 10 MB/s. I have constant write rates of around 30 MB/s using WD external disks.  Secure ripping in EAC is also much slower than 48x so even those 8 MB/s aren't reached.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #9 –
It's probably the cache mode for the external drives.  Assuming XP, the drive is probably set to quick removal instead of performance.  This means writes are not cached so the drive has to update the MFT/FAT constantly, causing the drive to thrash.  The thrashing, not USB would be the cause of the slowness.  Check the drive in device manager.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Quote from: JapanAudio on
USB 2.0 is very slow

Compared to what?

The actual Truth is the exact opposite - USB 2.0 is very fast compared to the usual speeds that CD ROMs rip audio CDs. So fast that it doesn't matter whether the optical drive or hard drive interfaces are USB 2.0, USB 3.0, Fi rewire, PATA, SATA, or any of the zillions of flavors of SCSI.  The OP essentially just confirmed this fact.

I know. I was just giving a quick answer, I knew this was going to create a reaction... Although the difference in protocols here is that USB uses the CPU alot as opposed to the other interfaces which have more hardware support. That's why USB 2.0 can be very slow, but cheap and convenient.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #11 –
USB 2.0 is 480 mbit/s, 60 MB/s.  That is only theoretical.  Any transfer has overhead, too.  It should only affect speed if you rip all the tracks to say WAVs first and then convert them to something big like FLAC to the same drive.  When I had my WD drive external I would see 50 mbit/s easy on reads and writes.  The biggest thing is that 60 MB/s isn't very fast so the USB bus can get saturated fairly easily.  Luckily computers have multiple USB controllers so all USB ports aren't on the same controller.  I can't wait until Light Peak comes out.  Hopefully Apple doesn't scoop up all the rights for it so it will be a universal thing and not just for Macs.  I would swear off computers then.

Location of hard drive affecting EAC ripping speed?

Reply #12 –
Have you tried different modes in EAC as well as additional ripping programs?  EAC has some glaring problems with certain drives that has nothing to do with USB 2.0.