SSD vs HDD for Recording PC gameplay?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
griptwister

griptwister

Distinguished
Oct 7, 2012
1,437
0
19,460
The title says most of it. I'm not sure what file formats I'd be using, but I'd be using fraps to record. I know SSDs give better framrates, but then again, I don't want to run out of storage. I'd eventually like to do play throughs rather than just gameplay.

What I'm thinking is I could go with a 128Gb drive for recording or dual 60gb SSDs in RAID.

Or I could run 2 10,000 RPM drives in RAID. The 10K drives offer more storage.

I'm really not sure what I should do right now.

Also, can anyone give me a estimate as to how much fraps video a 128gb drive would store?

I'm planning on 1080P @ 30FPS, 720P @ 60FPS, and maybe some 1440P footage at 25FPS.

Any advice would be helpful!
 
Solution
manofchalk
Yup, echoing the above responses and just get some HDD's in RAID 0.
Capture cards, not too clued into TBH. I know Avermedia make a few, and the Live Gamer HD might be a good option for you.

If your using a GTX700 series card, you will want too look into ShadowPlay which basically nullify's the need for a dedicated capture card as it has its own built-in H.264 encoder.
Sort by date Sort by votes
nukemaster

nukemaster

Titan
Nov 23, 2004
19,626
6
74,965
If the drive is dedicated it will not be dealing with random writes and will be sequential. So as the user above says. Go with 2 or more LARGE drives in raid0.

Always keep the drive defragmented between recordings to avoid too many random(drive heads move from location to location, this can take too much time and case a frame drop in real time capture) writes as hard drives are not great with them.

Also, if you are recording compressed video(with a dedicated card, so not fraps), the load on the drive is MUCH more easy.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
manofchalk

manofchalk

Glorious
May 11, 2012
12,914
3
48,960
Yup, echoing the above responses and just get some HDD's in RAID 0.
Capture cards, not too clued into TBH. I know Avermedia make a few, and the Live Gamer HD might be a good option for you.

If your using a GTX700 series card, you will want too look into ShadowPlay which basically nullify's the need for a dedicated capture card as it has its own built-in H.264 encoder.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
J

james_44

Honorable
Oct 9, 2012
49
0
10,540


I would say what if you get 2 120GB SSD under $200! What else can you dream off! I just purchased this on newegg. These are Sandforce driven & guaranteed for performance. If you get these Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB which is within your budget, you can have RAID configured & keep going! Hope this helps :)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
nukemaster

nukemaster

Titan
Nov 23, 2004
19,626
6
74,965
Unfortunately, The dedicated cards are very expensive when they do full HD.

[strike]If you happen to have a GTX 6XX or 7XX/Titan card. Nvidia will be releasing a software package that will do hardware recording from the card it self :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Shadowplay[/strike]

Scratch that. I see you do not.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
manofchalk

manofchalk

Glorious
May 11, 2012
12,914
3
48,960
^ I believe ShadowPlay is only good for 700 series cards, as it relies on a hardware H.264 encoder which isn't present on the 600 series cards.
Also it wont do the recording so much as it will encode the footage on the fly far without introducing CPU overhead, encoding the footage on the fly reduces its file size by a great deal, hence is pretty important if your recording any great deal of footage or your storage setup is lacking.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
nukemaster

nukemaster

Titan
Nov 23, 2004
19,626
6
74,965
the 6XX cards also have the same built in encoder. It is a Kepler feature.

The encoding is the part that can make fraps tank your performance :) that and having to slow the game to match the recording frame rate(or at least on older versions of it.).

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/geforce-experience-official-release
ShadowPlay leverages the H.264 encoder built in Kepler GPUs (GeForce GTX 600 series or higher) to record high quality, 1080p gameplay footage on the fly. Because it utilizes a dedicated hardware encoder, ShadowPlay lets you capture gameplay footage fulltime without tanking your framerate.
Click to expand...
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
griptwister

griptwister

Distinguished
Oct 7, 2012
1,437
0
19,460
You all gave such good answers!!! I'm personally a AMD guy, but I'm not prejudice against other the other brands. I'm considering an Nvidia GPU as well... I saw the GTX 780 Lightning... And I want it for my PC lol :x for now, I'll just wait till Maxwell and the AMD 9xxx series GPUs. I hope AMD gives some of this video encode support. But if not. I think I'll buy a 60gb SSD for my high pace TF2 matches and hopefully SWBF3. LOL!

But so far, My plan is to sell my monitor, buy a 1440P Korean monitor (I like the real estate for school work). Then, buy a new Processor and motherboard. And possibly new RAM (upgrade to my full capacity, 16Gb due to OS limitations). And then finally buy a new GPU. Which I know is important for 1440P. But I'll probably just run my games blown up to 1080P, because my Rig can handle that. But it's seriously time for a upgrade. Especially for video encoding and stuff.

I've got some good "spare money" coming in, so I'll not be budgeting myself too much. I'll probably end up buying 760 4GB and going SLI in the future... But first, I'll see how much the price drops on those 770 4Gbs when the new AMD gpus hit the market.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom