Transcoding Requirements - HDD

[kitsunegari]

Sorry for yet another transcoding thread, but this wasn't covered by the others so thought it warranted a new one. If not please do move it.

How much of a bottle neck is the speed of the hard drive? Currently due to my WHS setup I use an external USB hard drive, which I'm guessing is a fairly large bottleneck. So I'm considering chucking in a small ~50GB sata HDD purely for transcoding. Or would an SSD see significant improvement (I'm upgrading to a Quad core, from a dual core)?

[Aaron407]

SSD would be way overkill for transcoding. A SATA2 or SATA3 hard drive is more than enough. Even with a quad or six core processor, you still won't have the data throughput while transcoding to cause the hard drive to be a bottleneck, and your network will still be lagging far behind, even if it is gigabit capable. Save your money!

[kitsunegari]

Fair enough; though an SSD might be a decent overall upgrade for my server anyway, and they're not expensive any more. I guess a ~50gb sata drive (if I can even find one!) will be cheap as chips.