www.makemkv.com

Since I built my new rig last year I have noticed that after I rip a BD and start encoding with handbrake, my external drive is asleep during the entire encode. What I can come up with is Windows is caching the rip into memory. When handbrake accesses the file it just pulls it out of memory instead of accessing the drive.

What I was wondering is if I could load the decrypted bd directly into memory, skipping the formality of writing to disk? I believe the rip would go much quicker if this was a possibility.

Edit: I should say can I load the decrypted title into memory. I am not backing up the entire BD

In theory, you could increase the memory cache in MakeMKV, while using it as a decryption engine for handbrake, but MakeMKV will not allow that cache to exceed a gigabyte. And, when I tested this, having the cache set too big caused exactly what you're seeing - the drive stopped while the application using it "ate" the cache, and then wasn't ready when it got to the end, and timed out as the drive spun up again. To prevent that, I lowered the caching value (Preferences->IO menu).

Even if you are doing only one disk at a time, there probably would not be a speed advantage, because MakeMKV is already reading faster than handbrake can accept the data. If it wasn't, the drive would not be spinning down.

When you're dealing with more than one disk to rip, though, the speed advantage of writing to disk as MKV files, then having handbrake process those, is quite pronounced. I can rip a dozen disks to MKV files in the time it takes handbrake to process one of them, which means I can done with feeding disks, and let handbrake handle the queue while I do other things.