I currently use a simple HDD with 320 GB, 7200 rpm and 16 MB Cache. I have tried recording gameplay on this HDD and it was just bad. Very low framerates.
One of my friends told me on Teamspeak that I should get an SSD and instal Windows on that one and the game which I want to play. My gameplays I should record on that HDD. THis would, according to my friend be better and my framerates wouldn´t suffer.
My question now is whether he´s right.
If he is right which SSD should I get? I am looking for one that has 120 GB. Any good SSDs which you could recommend? I haven´t made any experiences with SSDs at all, that´s why I´m asking.
Well, I have compared my system to my friend´s system and his is worse. My CPU is a Phenom II X2 555 + HD 7770 and 6 GB System Ram. His sytem is almost the same except for his CPU being weaker. He´s still able to record gameplay in 720p with high framerates. Mainly older games such as Portal and Portal 2 etc. .
What the hell, fraps on Portal 2 (a little gpu-heavier than Portal 1) on your specs and a HDD, even IDE won't give bad framerates. And fraps slows quite a lot (cpu intensive). You must have bad recording settings. Capture cards don't slow anything as they are separate from the system, running on PCI, doing it's thing, right??
(I accidentaly recorded half an hour of Doom 3 on a 100GB 7200rpm laptop HDD, noticed a little slowdown early, but then was really smooth until I ran out of space.
Defragment your drive? Is this a clean install, no malware etc.?
also, make sure you are using some sort of compression on the video stream... if you are doing raw footage, its going to be close to gigabits per second... lol
fraps has very little compression (100-300MBps)... to record anything your gonna need a speedy drive, my frames drop to the 20's-30's when recording to my 2tb 5900RPM drive, and even less on my 320 series SSD
Install Fraps and Game to SSD, save video capture to HDD, run half detail and lock it at 30FPS (or use a diff peice of software like afterburner) your issue arrises cos your asking a HDD to read and write huge amounts of raw data at the same time.
faster storage = better fps .......... assuming the rest of your system is good enough for recording, obviously.
example of slow storage: using the same drive where game is installed for recording
example of fast drive: dedicated drive that is doing nothing but being recorded to, could be a sata mechanical drive or ssd, either would be faster than the slow option.
I've recorded Half-Life 2 while playing it on a different computer on the same HDD on lan (7200rpm IDE). The recording is his problem, hard disks aren't THAT slow for gamer's use, especially if your just playing. High cappacity SSDs get rather expensive to be worth the price.