Well I finally COMPLETED my new server build project.  I built a big old bad machine based on an Intel Xeon E-2136 Chip, 32Gb of RAM and about 20TB of hard drive storage.  I’m using Unraid as an OS.

One of my goals was to rip a bunch of my old DVD’s to put on the media server.  If the internet goes out………we will still have some entertainment.

The last piece of my server build was adding an internal DVD / Blu-Ray burner (Panasonic UJ-265).  Even though they advertise 6x read speeds I hope everyone knows you don’t always get that, if ever.  Anyway I hooked my drive up and did the old rip-a-rooni and it took a natural lifetime.  My read speed was 1.0x’s.  It was crawling and certainly not what I paid for to accomplish.

My ripper app is called MakeMKV.  It rips the DVD then I make it media sized with another program called Handbrake.

So why is my drive stuck at 1x’s read speed and taking so long?  I dunno but it is possible to set the speed to maximum in MakeMKV but it is a command line hack.

So you need to SSH into your Unraid box and issue this command:

nano /mnt/user/appdata/MakeMKV/settings.conf

You’ll get back a file that looks like this:

# MakeMKV settings file, written by MakeMKV v1.16.5 linux(x64-release)
#

app_DataDir = "/config/data"
app_DestinationDir = "/output"
app_DestinationType = "2"
app_Java = ""
app_Key = "T-TwE7WcJc3CdIsCfVWztmTjeXqLsgGE8MApbZpXqf5ofCoKTw8qIcSBb71vQzrkZ0fW"
app_Proxy = ""
app_ccextractor = "/opt/makemkv/bin/mmccextr"
sdf_Stop = ""
speed_HL-DT-ST_DVDRW__GX30N_RP09_K57B8H85544 = ""

Take a look at the last line. There are two quotation marks at the end. We are going to add 0=99 in between them so it looks like this:

speed_HL-DT-ST_DVDRW__GX30N_RP09_K57B8H85544 = "0=99"

This is not the only setting and more detailed instructions can be found here.  0=99 enables maximum speed.

So I do this and restart my container and at one point my read speeds hit 4.0x’s.  Way better than 1.0 or less which is what I had before.  A rip that took 1.5 hours now only took about 25 minutes.

Even though this is not intuitive or a tick mark in a box in a GUI, this is the kind of stuff that is fun for me.  Love it.  Time to rip, rip, rip.