Looking to build a compact pc tower for the sole purpose of ripping dvds as fast as possible. I have no need to encode on it, or burn... just looking to back up a very large collection of dvds in raw form. Two major factors to consider: 1.) cost - its not worth building a costly server or super machine, something from the general consumer product base (ie newegg) is best. 2.) number of dvd drives in relation to speed, more drives less speed, less drives, more speed, where is the balance? any tips or input is greatly apreciated Thanks in advance
Any cheap computer can rip a DVD, nothing special needed really. If you are building it yourself, I recommend a good power supply a Corsair 430W or 500W would be plenty and you will need a few hard drives. Western Digital have some with the new SATA standard that are decently priced.
...and just get cheap DVD drives; LG drives can rip DVDs just as well as Plextor, so no reason to waste money on expensive drives.
A corsair 430W or 500W would mean the CX Builder series. Avoid these, they're crap. First duff unit Corsair have produced. Go with an Antec EarthWatts Green instead. The 380W version will be plenty for a ripping/burning system. You don't need a fast CPU if you're only copying the data. If you're backing up many hundreds of DVDs it may be more beneficial to encode the DVDs instead of copying their contents though, to save needing enormous amounts of disk space. Grab something like three 24x LG drives like the GH24NS50 and three reasonable speed drives like the WD10EALS. You don't want to be copying from multiple DVD drives to the same hard disk, as two simultaneous file transfers will slow things down so much it'd be quicker to do them one at a time, so as many optical drives as you buy, get that many hard disks, or more, not less.
