Do not believe it's IO bound as handbreak is able to max out CPU reading and writing to the same partition (10 disk raid 6 array) - see IO stats below. root at masterbackend:/data$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/test bs=1G count=2 2+0 records in 2+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 4.87213 s, 441 MB/s