What HDD would you recommend for me?

[CaptainSours]

Hello,

I play PC games and record them too for my Youtube channel. I need a hard drive of a write speed of 80-100mps as I need to record in 1080p quality and be able to play the game/record at 30fps. My graphics card is the Sapphire Radeon 7770, so I get great FPS on games. My current hard disk is 1.5TB but only 5400RPM, and writes at only 50mbps. I am not looking for an SSD as I am on a budget of £50-£80. I was looking at the Seagate Barracuda on eBay, and it isn't too expensive, I just want to be advised on what to buy.


Thanks for your help.

 

[JustLurking]

Everyone has different experiences with HDD brands. I had horrible failures with Maxtor and Seagate and never touched them again.

Having said that, you should be fine if you run your games on one drive while saving your videos to a different drive, of any brand.

One thing to note, they all slow down as they get full. You'll see 100MB/s+ from most new drives empty, but quite a bit slower when full.

Btw, I have a 2TB WD Green that I think runs between 5400 and 5900 rpm, and until it gets somewhere around half full, the thing cruises well past 100MB/sec. Maybe your 1.5TB is (almost) full?

 

[CaptainSours]

It's partitioned into 2 partitions, one for recording and the other for my main C drive. Over all it has at least 600/700gb left on it. I have had HDD failures in the past, maybe just time to grab 2 new 1tb HDDs, one for Windows and the other for recording.

 

[JustLurking]

Yeah, you'll want a 2nd drive. A partition is still trying to read/write to the same drive.

Your game could be reading from one section of the drive, then your recording software has to re-seek to another section to write something, then the game has to seek back to the game section, rinse and repeat.

A second physical drive, on its own dedicated SATA controller, should be able to have the write head positioned without having to seek to it over and over (seeking is slow with HDD's).