So yeah...I really didn't do enough research on this before making my purchase. Newegg was having a really good sale on the Samsung 840 EVO 500gb SSD for $130 off. I've been wanting new storage dedicated to recording game footage with FRAPS for a long time now. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to make that happen since I've been making a little bit more money recently. So I purchased the EVO and have been getting great results from it ever since.
But then I started thinking about it, and remembered how SSD lifespan is, generally, based on write cycles. MLC and TLC drives don't live nearly as long as SLC drives. The problem with SLC drives is that they're crazy expensive. I've looked up the EVO (which is a TLC drive) and the general consensus is that its average lifespan is just over 3,000 write cycles. Each of my recording sessions with FRAPS easily take up over 100gb within about 40 minutes of footage. Once I've edited the source footage and compressed it with x264, I delete the source to free up the space on the SSD so I can record more.
I get the feeling that I'm just steadily killing my SSD now, and that I made a really stupid purchase and was probably way better off getting a couple 1tb hard drives and running them in raid 0. Anyone care to confirm my stupidity or possibly reassure me that it's not actually a big deal?
I'm not super informed when it comes to fraps, but assuming the speed of SSDs isn't extremely helpful with recording it probably wouldn't be a good idea to record to it. But hey, 500GB SSDs are awesome, just put a bunch of games on it or something. But I would think using 1 TB drives would be a better setup for longevity since you write so much data to the drive when recording.
According to them, the conservative estimated lifespan for the 500GB Evo is just over 15 years at 100 GB/day. Unless you are recording more than 200 GB every single day without fail, I wouldn't worry about it too much. The bigger the drive, the more you can write to it in its lifecycle.
That makes me feel A LOT better. I usually do one session a day. Sometimes I do two. Regardless, it wouldn't surprise me if my drive didn't last 15 years. But even half that time span is long enough for me to justify the purchase. Thanks for posting.
I know that SSD write speeds help when compared to a single, standard HDD. I'm just not sure how big of a difference it makes when compared to two hard drives running in RAID0. I do remember watching a video from NCIX featuring Linus where they had two SSDs in Raid0 in a system running dual GTX 580s. They recorded Crysis 2 at max settings with anti-aliasing using FRAPS in Lossless RGB mode and got 60 frames per second the entire time. The final recording was 1080p 60 fps and perfectly smooth. Zero stuttering. I generally get right around 30 FPS solid, but it does dip to the mid 20s at times. But I think my dated graphics card is to blame for that. I'm positive that a powerful graphics card makes a difference in performance while recording.
What crazymobster said as modern SSDs are meant to last a lot longer but obviously only time will tell if these claims hold true ... As for Recording Why do it on the SSD in the first place? Recording to a HDD vs an SSD will take just as long (for obvious reasons) and if You're scared about writing so much data I suppose you could edit large chunks of the 100GB file (as keep the footage you want get rid of what you don't) than do the minor editing and.H264 compression on the SSD it adds more steps but the encoding is where you're probably going to see the most benefit of an SSD.
That's Just my advice based off my ever limited knowledge...
Umm no? I mean that in the sense that yes writing to am SSD is a lot faster but in your situation if you game and record for say 60 mins than you'll be writing to either a HDD or an SSD for 60 mins an ssd won't change that your benefit in using an ssd is when you edit/encode/compile your ssd will do that much faster than a HDD could ever dream of .... In esscene writing to an ssd is what degrades its life ....reading however ... Not so much.
The fact that your actively writing footage to a drive for 60 mins ... SSD be written to a lot faster if you're transferring a drive but you are creating content as you write therefore no benefit there.
