is it bad?

is it bad for your pc if your extracting videos from cd and burning at the same time? how about converting videos and burning simultaneosly?

i heard its bad for your harddisk.. i'm using seagate hd. core 2 duo with 2x512 ram.

thanks.

If you have one physical hard disk, then possibly, since the internal heads reading the disk will be jumping back and forth a lot to accomodate reading and writing from different areas at the same time, which can reduce the life of the disk :p Older bittorrent clients were good at killing HDs too if you left it running at high upload and download speeds for long periods of time, since they also caused the HD to do a large amount of reads and writes all over the disk :p

If you have several physical disks though, and are using one for reading data for burning, another one for reading the video you're encoding, and the third to write the encoded data (ideally), then provided your PC is fast enough to cope, then there shouldn't be a problem :p I've had no problem with ripping a DVD and burning a different DVD at the same time with my 5 year old laptop, using two different burners and two different physical HDs for the reading and writing :p Note this is multiple physical disks, and not different partitions on the same disk.

Eh... If you ask me, yeah, it's bad... providing you do that 24 hours a day for 2 years.

A slightly related question I guess: How do you know if you've got two drives and not just two partitions? My laptop says its got a 100 GB HD in its documentation but in the My Computer window its got a C and a D drive of both about 50 GB... Would that be partitioned or two actual drives?

Open 'er up and look. Seeing as it's a laptop, it's probably a partition. There wouldn't be that much physical space for two drives.

It's not good to encode and burn at the same time because you drive your likelihood for errors up. But that might be more of a thing of the past by now.

Right click my computer
click properties
click the hardware tab
click device manager
click on the + beside disk drives
If there is one listed, you probably have one drive.
If there is two, well.. two.