[CS-FSLUG] CD ripping speeds

[john-thomas richards]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 05:30:35PM -0500, Brian Derr wrote:
> > I have been playing with, er, *working* with an old Pentium 200MHz
> > computer with 64MB RAM.  I installed some ripping software (abcde - no,
> > really...that is what it is called) and ripped some CD's.  The CDROM is
> > only 16X but it rips at two or three times the speed of my 32X CDROM on
> > my much more powerful dual-processor main computer.  I use the same
> > ripping software and the *identical* settings (I copied the config
> > file).  Any ideas why a slower CDROM is ripping much faster than a
> > "faster" CDROM?
> 
> Although highly unlikely it could be DMA settings.  I doubt that the
> motherboard has a 100MHz IDE bus and CD-ROMs generally only use 33 or
> maybe 66MHz of bus bandwidth.  Perhaps the DMA settings or IDE driver on
> your main system are messed up?  Run 'hdparm -t /dev/hdxx' a few times
> and see what type of speeds your getting.  If they are really slow check
> to see if UDMA is enabled.  It will drastically increase your hard drive
> and possibly CD-ROM access times.


32x drive:

bird:/etc# hdparm -t /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   2 MB in  4.12 seconds = 497.53 kB/sec
bird:/etc/#


16x drive:
johnson:/etc/# hdparm -t /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   2 MB in 12.21 seconds = 167.73 kB/sec
johnson:/etc/#

Here is a sample difference in ripping:

32x:
bird:/etc/# time cdparanoia -- "-1"
[snip]
Done.

real   3m59.034s
user   2m12.562s
sys    0m4.142s


16x:
johnson:/etc# time cdparanoia -- "-1"
[snip]
Done.

real   1m13.700s
user   0m20.980s
sys    0m4.520s

As you can see the 32x drive is much faster in reading data (4 seconds
versus 12 seconds for 2MB) while it is *much* slower in ripping music
(4 minutes versus 1.25 minutes).  I used the same data CD in each test
and the same music CD in each test.

I have hdparm installed but it is not configured on either system (no
changes have been made to /etc/hdparm.conf).
-- 
john-thomas
------
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)