Which SSD for Fraps?

[Grummers]

Hello all,

I'm looking for a better SSD for video capture using FRAPS.
I'm currently recording onto a 120GB Corsair force GT.
Does anyone know which would be the best choice? I'm thinking the one with the highest performance at fast sequential writes of uncompressed data? correct me if I'm wrong...

From experimenting I've found that the difference between recording onto a hard drive is significantly worse than using the SSD.


Would the Neutron GTX 240GB be a good choice?

Hoping to here from some people who know more about SSD's than myself.


Thanks,

 

[PapaSmurf6768]

To be honest any SSD is going to be great at recording footage, and the difference between them will be negligible. A Neutron GTX would be good, you also might want to check out Samsung's new 840 and 840 Pro line.

 

[rossi94]

Mhm I use a 7200 RPM 1TB Seagate drive just for Fraps 1280 x 720 60 fps np SSD will get full very fast.

 

[Josh Weston]

I don't really think that Fraps requires an SSD to dump on. It's very data heavy, but there are hard drives on the market that shall work perfectly fine. A Western Digital Caviar Black is a good option.

SSD performance deteriorates through being written to, so i'd expect Fraps to royally thrash it.

Hard drive sequential writes really aren't too bad these days, and the cost per gigabyte, although SSDs are getting cheaper, is far better with hard drives.

 

[rossi94]

And the fraps files are really large 1080p and 60 fps makes ~ 10 GB per min. Just put the os on a SSD and get a 7200 RPM HDD with 64 MB Cache. Sata III won't be required.

 

[iBeInspire]

As said before Writing to an SSD is going to completely thrash it, probably not advisable...
A higher end mech drive would be sufficient for 1080p @Full Frame @60FPS...

 

[Grummers]

I understand that SSD's have a write limit where the begin to deteriorate.
Surely, even if I write say 100GB of data to a drive a day, it would still last years before this happens? (I wouldn't be writing that much anyway)....

I've tested a couple of scenarios, recording the same game 1. On SSD, and then the same thing on a hard drive. (In this case a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB) When recording to the ssd instead of the hdd the difference in performance is more than noticeable. Since a 1 minute of video footage at 1080p is roughly ~4GB I would like a larger drive to write on to.

Something to think about...5 year warranty on these SSD's, I doubt the amount of filming I would do would make the drive fail in that time span, would the warranty still be valid if it does?

 

[rossi94]

If you want to do slow motion you'll need more fps and 24 is enough for realtime .. but if you want to do some you'll need the 60 what means you'll need more than the double of the space + I'm sure you're talking about 720p HD (1280x720) and not 1080p (1920x1080).

I'm to lazy to view my frags every time after playing so I keep recording and safe them. Your SSD would be full in < 3 hours ..

But it's your choice ..

 

[Grummers]

Just checked my video folder, a 56 second long Fraps video recorded at 1080p @ 60FPs is 3.95GB. Is this different for yourself?
What I'll mostly be recording is staged events rather than general frags. When I record I turn the screen resolution down to 1080p just so that I record that natively. (PC struggles to record at 1440p, plus files are 60% bigger AGAIN, they get big)

Funnily enough both my hard drives are getting full too, if a good HDD is good enough to record maybe a 2TB one would be a better choice.

Thanks for everyone's comments.

 

[rossi94]

Oh sorry - my bad, but still huge .. 5 gb 1 min means (120/5)< 30 min of video .. and NTFS reservs space for mft too etc.

 

[iBeInspire]

BTW, Just a tip, If you use playclaw It has the option to discard your recoding mid-game...
Really useful if you record a whole game and didn't get anything lovely, just hit the hotkey and it cancels/deletes the entire recording...
I used to record to a 250Gb HDD like this, and never really hit memory problems...
And personally, I can't tell the difference in quality...

 

[SuB]

If you're just after action snippets from fraps you should use the loop recording thing. Set it up to 'buffer' 60 seconds. press and HOLD record the number goes pink.

Then it will buffer the last 60 seconds of video on the drive, making a file maximum of around 4GB (not 10GB at all, even at 60FPS). When something amazing happens, tap record button again to save the last 60 seconds of footage and continue recording again. This will continue to save the file until you hit record again.

So basically it won't FILL your drive it will keep 60 seconds of buffer until you hit record again.

It's a great way to capture 'those moments' and still have drive space when you're done. Keeps your clips small and manageable and less footage to trawl through later.

If you're recording long games, just get a decent HDD and you'll be fine. SSD's are faster but as people say they deteriorate.

If you're REALLY serious about it, sell the SSD you're using for recording, get a decent sized hard drive and pickup one of the 'external' capture cards. You put a cable from graphics card to it, then it to your screen. It then captures in 1080p30fps but will encode it on the fly. No processor hit as it's all done on-card and your games continue to run fine.

 

[I Hunta x]

If you're REALLY serious about it, sell the SSD you're using for recording, get a decent sized hard drive and pickup one of the 'external' capture cards. You put a cable from graphics card to it, then it to your screen. It then captures in 1080p30fps but will encode it on the fly. No processor hit as it's all done on-card and your games continue to run fine.

This is a good option.

Another is picking up something like 2x 1tb spinpoint f3 (about the same performance as a caviar black but not much more than a standard 1tb drive) and whacking them in raid 0, will give you plenty of space and will have a nice speed bump over a single drive for the extra bit of headroom just in case.