Converting videos--faster?

[levells]

I've been converting a lot of movies and shows lately to put on my ipod. I'm using WinFF and I was wondering if the conversion would go faster if I had the export folder on my internal hard drive. Right now, the source files are on the external hard drive and exported to a different folder on the external hard drive.
Has anyone found/heard of a difference?

[Bachstelze]

Probably wouldn't make any difference. Disk I/O is definitely not the usual bottleneck for wideo transcoding.

[TenPlus1]

I find that using mplayer/mencoder for transcoding videos is faster than winff or using ffdshow libs...