I urge everyone to get a SSD it makes things load much faster than having 200 cpu's and gigabytes of ram. if you feel the need to upgrade anything buy a SSD it wont help handbrake but it will dramatically improve your normal bottleneck and allow you to flex those 6 cores more efficiently by feeding it data quicker.Ī SSD wont help handbrake a single bit A SSD is an IO device but if your normal bottleneck is I/O (and for vast majority of normal tasks it is) then it will let your CPU's process more efficiently as it will be waiting less for IO. you could throw a few thousand dollars at a faster computer and all it will do is make handbrake finish a few mins quicker. which is a good thing that means your computer is plenty adequate for your uses and dont really need an upgrade. thus why your seeing 100% CPU usage on this job (processing bottleneck vs input/output bottleneck) which probably is quite abnormal for your use because you dont see it happen with other tasks. This particular task your performing requires much more processing so your CPU will be pegged well before any read/write access is limited. Alot of the time when you wait on your computer (aka hitting a bottlekneck) its probably at the disk level, so your CPU sits idle while something is being read/written off a disk. Video Encoding is more CPU intensive than it is read/write intensive.

Why does handbrake take so long