Question Is it worth upgrading my PC/HTPC?

[Big Rob]

I was thinking of upgrading my PC. At the moment I use it as a HTPC and a general PC for web surfing, blu-ray ripping/encoding etc.

Current set up

AMD 640 3.0Ghz quad core
8 GB DDR3 1333Mhz
128g Samsung SSD
Radeon HD6670
Asus M5A78L-M LX V2 Motherboard
Corsair Builder Series CX500W PSU
LG Blu-ray drive
Trendsonic Apollo ATX Gaming Case
3x WD 3 TB Desktop SATA Hard Drive
2x 3TB External WD My Book Live
1x 4TB External Toshiba Canvio

The good - With this set up I can stream full Blu rays with HD audio to my TV, projector & Monitor.

The Bad - Only 2.0 USB, Cant plug extra hard drives into motherboard. I would prefer all hard drives to be internal. Also a second HDMI out would be handy. Can be sluggish when encoding.

Any advice to what I can do would be great.

 

[EndlessWaves]

That motherboard has six SATA ports but you appear to have four SATA devices. Why can't you plug more in?

What encoding are you doing? Presumably you're down-sampling the blu-rays for smaller screens or to save space rather than transcoding them to a more efficient storage format? Specifically whether you'd want to use dedicated encoding hardware included in modern graphics that's much faster but slightly lower quality.

 

[Big Rob]

I forgot about a 1 TB drive and does the blu ray drive not use a sata port?
I just encode my blu rays down to about 15gb mkvs. It takes about 3-5 hours depending of the disc.

 

[EndlessWaves]

You mentioned the blu-ray drive and three hard drives that weren't external. Hence 4 SATA ports in use with 2 apparently free. Even with the extra 1TB drive that's still one unaccounted for.

Which video format are you encoding to? Are you re-encoding just the VC-1 blu-rays to H.264 or are you swapping them to HEVC or VP9 at original quality to take advantage of the more efficient compression?

 

[Big Rob]

Maybe I miss counted, I thought I had no ports left, but I will run out of space soon.
I'm just encoding to H.264. I did try HEVC but it took 15 hours to do one film. I don't know about vp9.

 

[EndlessWaves]

Well you will need a definite count of SATA devices when considering your options for upgrades. No point in spending more to get a motherboard with ten ports only to discover you've got eleven devices and will need an SATA card anyway.

A lot of blu-rays are already H.264 so I'm not sure why you're encoding to the same format at the same or a slightly lower quality. Have you tried just remuxing them to MKV instead of converting? That should be a lot faster.

 

[Big Rob]

I remux some of them, but anything over 20gb I encode down to 15gb to save space. It's worth doing and it doesn't lose any noticeable quality. Something with ten ports would do, any recommendations? Thanks