Dedicated MakeMKV machine

[devanhcrow]

I rip a lot of discs at a time and I'm looking into building a dedicated makeMKV machine that can process 10 discs at a time.

I'd like to get feedback from anyone who has built a similar rig and and issues you encountered.

The parts I'm looking to use are: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LQWR2R

The Plextor M8Se(Y) will be used as the OS (windows) SSD and the external 6TB (already have from a previous build) will be the ripping scratch disk.

After ripping is done, the files will be renamed and transferred over the network to me Plex Media Server.

All tips and hints (money saving or otherwise) are fully welcome and appreciated.

The current price list shows the cost to be around $1300. I plan to purchase some parts used off ebay but the optical drivers, I'll most likely purchase brand new.

[Woodstock]

Using an external hard drive will slow you down beyond 4 optical drives, to be honest. Internal would see problems as well, because there is a limit to the bandwidth to the hard drive, although it might hold off until 5 optical drives were active.

A single drive ripping can saturate a 100Mb/s network connection in my testing.

Running a machine with "just" two or three drives will take a lot of your time, if you're trying to select what will be ripped and providing names for the files.

[devanhcrow]

Using an external hard drive will slow you down beyond 4 optical drives, to be honest. Internal would see problems as well, because there is a limit to the bandwidth to the hard drive, although it might hold off until 5 optical drives were active.

A single drive ripping can saturate a 100Mb/s network connection in my testing.

Running a machine with "just" two or three drives will take a lot of your time, if you're trying to select what will be ripped and providing names for the files.

- Good points Woodstock, for the external hard drive I would have used a USB 3.0 connection which may not have given a bottleneck. I would definitely prefer having the scratch disk internal though. The issue is finding a motherboard with enough onboard SATA ports and I really don't want to go the SATA to PCIe route. I always rip all files from each disk and rename them for Plex. I always include all the extras etc where possible.

[Woodstock]

USB3 is not as fast for drives as people think it is, because you still have a USB->SATA interface at the other end. You would actually be better off with and internal hard drive and putting one (or more) of the optical drives on USB, maybe use 5 or 6 opticals with direct SATA connections, and additional using USB3.

Not to mention that if you're writing random data to a single drive, head seeks are going to be an issue on throughput. You'll want to do some write caching to help with optimizing write performance. And you might want to use an SSD as the "write to" disk, and pull the data from it to larger storage as time allows.

Are you planning on using the command line to just dump the disk's contents? If you're doing any manual intervention, I can't see a real way to feed 10 drives consistently and keeping them spinning. When I'm "in the groove", it's hard enough with three drives.

[raresolid]

Woodstock is right. Regardless if you use an Internal SATA drive or USB3.0 external drives, the drive itself on both options are SATA and your only going to get SATA HDD speeds. That is if we are talking about trying to get full speed from each drive. If you are, then I would recommend getting an SSD and then ripping everything to that drive.

If your not worried about the speed of each drive and just want to load up all your optical drives to get them ripping and then walk away for a couple of hours then ripping to the HDD will not be a problem.

Would love to see some photos of it when your all done!