New Hard Drive for Fraps?

[Deleted]

Hello! I have once again got stuck in the endless mires of the computer world, this time while trying to find a good option for a hard drive when using Fraps.

So I am currently using my 240 GB SSD for fraps which means that I run everything on it while recording. It works out pretty well except for the fact that I probably won't be able to record with heavier games than WoW for long before the file sizes swallows my poor SSD (Fraps files are huge).

So I decided that I need a new internal hard drive to record onto, but while searching on the internet, just like so many times there are lots of different situations and it really got me confused.

What I thought is that I can maybe grab a Seagate Barracuda with 1.5 TB and 7200 RPM. Or is that going to slow my recording performance down by a whole lot and make the video choppy by recording the video onto it?

Here is my computer specs:

Intel Core i7-3820 (CPU)

16 GB of RAM

GTX 680 (GPU)

240 GB SSD with 555MB/510MB/s read/write

I am sorry that I keep coming back here for aid quite frequently but I often get quick and good advice here...

[n0cturnal]

SSDs are not made for recording video on, they have limited writes and having Fraps dump tons of data on them every day is not a good idea.

Any decent HDD will be enough for recording up to 1080p with unless you record RAW, if you want to record RAW you need 2 drives in RAID0.

[Deleted]

SSDs are not made for recording video on, they have limited writes and having Fraps dump tons of data on them every day is not a good idea.

Any decent HDD will be enough for recording up to 1080p with unless you record RAW, if you want to record RAW you need 2 drives in RAID0.

Hm... What does RAW mean? And if I am recording RAW how do I go about with this ''RAID0"?

[n0cturnal]

Hm... What does RAW mean? And if I am recording RAW how do I go about with this ''RAID0"?

I believe the setting in Fraps is called "Force lossless RGB capture", what it does is that it records the footage with more color representation but it also takes up a lot more space and puts higher requirements on the transfer speed of your hard drives.

This chart shows the speeds required to use whatever setting you might want to record with.

RAID0 is when you combined 2 or more hard drives in a Raid array but don't use it for redundancy but instead for increased speed, with a RAID0 setup you can almost double the speed of your drives if you use 2 of them. This requires either a Software or hardware to setup, most modern motherboards in the middle class and upwards have support for this.

[Deleted]

I believe the setting in Fraps is called "Force lossless RGB capture", what it does is that it records the footage with more color representation but it also takes up a lot more space and puts higher requirements on the transfer speed of your hard drives.

This chart shows the speeds required to use whatever setting you might want to record with.

RAID0 is when you combined 2 or more hard drives in a Raid array but don't use it for redundancy but instead for increased speed, with a RAID0 setup you can almost double the speed of your drives if you use 2 of them. This requires either a Software or hardware to setup, most modern motherboards in the middle class and upwards have support for this.

Well I got into the yellow category so I suppose I need this RAID0 because I don't know what he means with high performance hard drive...

And is setting up RAID0 like difficult as in does it have a high rate of extreme failure causing the hard drives to break in the process or something like that? I haven't even installed a new HDD before...

[n0cturnal]

Well I got into the yellow category so I suppose I need this RAID0 because I don't know what he means with high performance hard drive...

And is setting up RAID0 like difficult as in does it have a high rate of extreme failure causing the hard drives to break in the process or something like that? I haven't even installed a new HDD before...

High performance hard drive is a good quality 7200RPM drive that is constantly kept defragmented and not too full of data, I wouldn't expect much over 100MB/s from a normal hard drive that you use for other stuff than just recording too.

[Deleted]

High performance hard drive is a good quality 7200RPM drive that is constantly kept defragmented and not too full of data, I wouldn't expect much over 100MB/s from a normal hard drive that you use for other stuff than just recording too.

Well as it looks right now I will be using this hard drive for Fraps files only so it will pretty much be kept clean from files for every video recording...

Should I perhaps buy a single HDD and see how it works out just to buy another one if it turns out that it lacks performance? If that is possible? As I said I have no clue how this RAID0 works so I don't know if there's certain rules to how it has to be done etc.

And you say that it has to be of good quality? What defines a good quality hard drive in that case other than the RPM?

[n0cturnal]

Well as it looks right now I will be using this hard drive for Fraps files only so it will pretty much be kept clean from files for every video recording...

Should I perhaps buy a single HDD and see how it works out just to buy another one if it turns out that it lacks performance? If that is possible? As I said I have no clue how this RAID0 works so I don't know if there's certain rules to how it has to be done etc.

And you say that it has to be of good quality? What defines a good quality hard drive in that case other than the RPM?

Yes you can start by using one drive and see how it works out for you, a Western Digital Caviar Blue should do the trick.

[Deleted]

Yes you can start by using one drive and see how it works out for you, a Western Digital Caviar Blue should do the trick.

Do you mean ''Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM SATA/600 16MB''? Because that's what I found.

[n0cturnal]

Do you mean ''Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM SATA/600 16MB''? Because that's what I found.

Yes that will work.