Recording with Fraps - What type of hard drive?

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Yeah, they look pretty good besides the color darkness thing that fraps does. I don't know what to say. I don't know how you can do it with 35 MB/s.

I stopped using fraps a while ago and I use Dxtory with Lagarith Lossless Codec.

The first videos were also recorded on my old C2D E8400 machine.

I tried using the recorder in Afterburner, but Sony Vegas refuses to process those files :/

[Elemair]

Wrong. SSDs can write much quicker than any HDD, unless of course you have like 8 HDDs RAIDed up...

I digress, per GB, it is indeed far too expensive, though they have come down tremendously.

However, being someone who Fraps on a daily basis, I can tell both you and the OP, that unless you record at 60 fps and above 1080p, you won't be eating your space that quickly. 30 fps@1920x1080 equals A LOT of raw footage per GB. Besides, say you're recording while raiding, you wipe? You stop recording, tab out, delete file, get back in, start recording again on the next attempt. You never run out.

Are there any HDs that you would consider better than others for video streaming, i.e. the velociraptor etc and are they worth buying? Or is a regular 7600 RPM HD 1 TB fine? Any specific companies that are better than others, etc. Does an SSD improve how fast it writes to the 1 TB hard drive and will it improve my FPS?

[Warrax]

Wrong. SSDs can write much quicker than any HDD, unless of course you have like 8 HDDs RAIDed up...

What he probably meant is that SDD degrade quickly when witting on them, it's not terrible but if you record a lot of video on an SSD, it won't last.

As for the OP, any hard disk will do as long as the game you play is from another drive. Playing on the same drive you're recording is VERY taxing on the hard drive and will pummel your FPS while recording, it's kind of impossible to record at 1080p/60fps in such a case so you need an hard drive specifically for video recording. An SSD is waste for that, use an SSD to boot Windows and to run your favorites games, don't constantly write stuff on it.

My recommendation is a Western Digitital Black Caviar, they are fast and have a good price, Blue drives are fine too. Velociraptor are fine, they are the fastest mechanical drives but only worth buying if they are on sale. Green drives should be fine too but they tend to be very cheap (won't last long, tend to be DOA) and are usually stupidly slow, avoid them until they get more reliable.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Green drives should be fine too but they tend to be very cheap (won't last long, tend to be DOA) and are usually stupidly slow, avoid them until they get more reliable.

Green drives are SUPPOSED to be slow. They are for low-wattage builds, that don't need high-speed storage.

[Ghâzh]

Yeah, they look pretty good besides the color darkness thing that fraps does. I don't know what to say. I don't know how you can do it with 35 MB/s.

I stopped using fraps a while ago and I use Dxtory with Lagarith Lossless Codec.

The darkness isn't actually anything that fraps does. It's either the gamma he's playing at or an after effect. You can make it look as light or dark as you want.

And just my personal opinion but it looks damn good like that to be honest.

My recommendation is a Western Digitital Black Caviar, they are fast and have a good price, Blue drives are fine too. Velociraptor are fine, they are the fastest mechanical drives but only worth buying if they are on sale. Green drives should be fine too but they tend to be very cheap (won't last long, tend to be DOA) and are usually stupidly slow, avoid them until they get more reliable.

Green drives are the "eco" version. They are a lot quieter compared to black and blue drives and they alter their speed maxing at 5400RPM. Blue's are the cheaper version of black drives made from worse quality parts and tend to break more easily as you'd figure.

[Warrax]

Green drives are SUPPOSED to be slow. They are for low-wattage builds, that don't need high-speed storage.

I'm totally aware of that, what I'm saying is that recently, buying a green drive is a gamble as most of them doesn't perform and doesn't last as they should and by perform I mean going over 1mb/sec when writing on them; a lot of them are broken like that so what I'm saying is to not buy them as you may regret it. Good for anyone who has one and is doing fine.

[mojo6912]

The darkness isn't actually anything that fraps does. It's either the gamma he's playing at or an after effect. You can make it look as light or dark as you want.

No, It's Fraps. My Raw footage from fraps always looks darker like that even before and editing or uploading. Rendering it as MP4 can darken it even more and uploading to youtube can darken even further. Raw footage from Dxtory or most other capture programs does not darken like Fraps does. I have tried almost all of them.

You can avoid this by capturing in lossless RGB but that is so taxing on system resources almost no one does it.

[DeltrusDisc]

Are there any HDs that you would consider better than others for video streaming, i.e. the velociraptor etc and are they worth buying? Or is a regular 7600 RPM HD 1 TB fine? Any specific companies that are better than others, etc. Does an SSD improve how fast it writes to the 1 TB hard drive and will it improve my FPS?

1TB 7200RPM Samsung SpinPoint F3 or Western Digital Caviar Blue/Black.

---------- Post added 2013-01-14 at 08:36 PM ----------

No, It's Fraps. My Raw footage from fraps always looks darker like that even before and editing or uploading. Rendering it as MP4 can darken it even more and uploading to youtube can darken even further. Raw footage from Dxtory or most other capture programs does not darken like Fraps does. I have tried almost all of them.

You can avoid this by capturing in lossless RGB but that is so taxing on system resources almost no one does it.

I've not had this problem, nor have I ever heard of it, and I've been using and owned Fraps for several years now.

[Faithh]

Yeah, they look pretty good besides the color darkness thing that fraps does. I don't know what to say. I don't know how you can do it with 35 MB/s.

I stopped using fraps a while ago and I use Dxtory with Lagarith Lossless Codec.

Smart guy who actually doesn't pay 200eur just to record with fraps..

[TJ]

Have fraps on your primary drive and then buy a separate normal HDD to record on to. It's best to have a modern HDD as your second one also, because if the write speed is too low then it won't be able to write the fraps files you are recording quick enough and this will cause lag in your footage (that is what happened to me). I bought a seagate barricuda drive and on most games I can record with no lag at all barring fps drops in intense situations, whereas before, if I was recording it would severely affect me playing the game.

[DeltrusDisc]

Smart guy who actually doesn't pay 200eur just to record with fraps..

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Fraps is $37.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

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Fraps is $37.

Didn't it use to be 20 bucks?

[DeltrusDisc]

Didn't it use to be 20 bucks?

I bought it a good 4 years ago and it was $37 as I recall.

There was one really shitty recorder though that was $20 as I recall, and they still forced their water-mark on your videos and recorded with horrid quality.

[llDemonll]

...

Fraps is $37.

i think he's referring to needing an additional hard drive to record to

[DeltrusDisc]

i think he's referring to needing an additional hard drive to record to

Either way, alluding to people who use Fraps as not being smart is not the sweetest remark I've seen.

[Faithh]

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Fraps is $37.

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2x Black 1TB is 200 eur.

[n0cturnal]

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2x Black 1TB is 200 eur.

I didn't know there was a requirement of 2x WD Caviar Black to run Fraps.

[DeltrusDisc]

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2x Black 1TB is 200 eur.

Lol.

I record to a single WD Caviar Blue 600GB.

Try again bud.

---------- Post added 2013-01-14 at 11:33 PM ----------

And if you don't believe me:

[llDemonll]

...

2x Black 1TB is 200 eur.

Please stop while you're ahead. This is going to turn into a flamefest otherwise.

[Alindra]

This post and chart were the best information I could find with regards to sequential writes with FRAPs. I've checked it against some of my older clips / info others have posted, and it seems to match very well. (My clips weren't full 1080p, so I can't confirm those figures.)