Fraps HDD Question and CS5 HDD Question

[UpstartXT]

1. I am wondering how much money I need to put into additional hard drives in order to not have them be the bottleneck for FPS when recording with FRAPS. It's just too much it seems for one HDD, even an SSD, to be both reading the game files and simultaneously trying to write the video infomation to the same hard drive.

Therefore I assume I should go with a separate hard drive/s. Would one Samsung F3 7200 Spinpoint drive do the trick, or am I looking at needing to do RAID 0 with multiple drives in an attempt to get better write throughput?

My friend records at 1080P to 3 drives in a RAID 0, but I'm wondering if that is overkill. The computer I will be recording with is an i7 920 @ 3.8ghz, GTX 470, 6 GB RAM, 1680x1050 resolution, currently just have an x-25 m 160 gb with no trim support as my os/games drive.

2. I am also putting together a video editing rig to run Premiere and After Effects on to edit and render video. I hear from some of those professional guys that they have a separate drive each for boot/os/apps, "scratch" (not even sure what that is?), source footage, and renders. That way one hard drive will not have to do double duty reading/writing when rendering.

Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about, and how necessary it is (I'm not a professional, just a hobby video editor). I won an x-25m 160GB SSD in a BC2 competition, so I was going to use that as a boot/os/apps disk, then get a 1TB drive for source and a 500gb drive for renders. Is that stupid?

 

[Emulex]

well you have to consider that separate drives with a proper controller will get dispatch i/o threads so if you have 4 cores you can dispatch more workers to tend to the drive subsystem at the same time.

linear writes where you keep things nicely defragged and linear (like log file in sql) works best with a high speed drive (sas,velociraptor, whatever you can afford. this is not ideal for SSD since it will put extreme wear on MLC

CS5 likes to use a scratch file - keep in mind most everything you use professional is > RAM. If you have 192gb of ram and the 64bit version - don't sweat it. if you have 6gb of ram and 32 bit version - put the photoshop swap file on a intel 510 or x25-m. the seek times will help.

Next up: Video card for GPU processing PHYSX - get a 1GB card at least doesn't have to be fast but don't skimp and go 512meg or intel graphcs here. CS5 uses the card when it can.

Since you are not doing a cache write back controller - i'd suggest splitting it up. raid-0 is not ideal without gobs of ram.

Everything changes when you have a shizton of ram and start to use enterprise mlc and storage tiering. you can throw all those rules in the trash - just like sql server. The rules are being rewritten with modern storage - but what your doing i'd stick to NO RAID, more drives (they are cheap). 160gb ssd for boot, 1TB (or 3TB) for source/dest and get as much ram as you can afford for 64bit mode of the app. sounds reasonable. you can add drives and hell you can convert them to raid to test but get it sounds reasonable.

 

[drevin]

Considering the fraps recordings, desired frame rate also matters. If you want to record 60fps video, it will require a faster HDD than recording 30fps.

My rig specs:

-C2D 3,16GHz
-GTX 260
-4Gb RAM
-Samsung F1 750Gb (Primary)
-Caviar Black 1Tb (Secondary)

Games are installed on the primary HDD, fraps records to the secondary HDD. My display limits me to 1280x1024 and I can record that resolution in 60fps without the HDD becoming a bottleneck.

 

[Emulex]

can't go wrong with a 600gb velociraptor or 4

 

[UpstartXT]

Wow, that's a heck of a lot of information right there.

@Emulex regarding question 1, half of the stuff you have said is over my head lol. I'm just a hobbyist not a professional, so I'm watching the budget on my build. Is the performance increases from having all of these separate drives worth the money? How much slower would programs like Premiere and After Effects run if my source videos and everything else were all on one drive?

BTW, the editing computer in question will have 16GB RAM, and a 2500K CPU (OCd), with 2x GTS 450s (one for CUDA, one to power second monitor). When you said PHYSX, I assume you meant CUDA?

@Drevin, I knew I was forgetting something. I am wanting to record at 60 FPS, and again, 1680x1050.

I realize 4 velociraptors may give me peace of mind that hard drives won't bottleneck me, but I don't have an unlimited budget lol (that's like $1200 worth of hard drives). At that price, I bet I could find some sort of HDMI recorder and just run a cloned dual screen to that and have that thing record.


BTW, for readers wondering what scratch disks are in CS5, http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premierepro/cs/using/WS369BD79A-5DF9-48d8-9F49-6B56026087C8.html

Also, see this: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972

 

[drevin]

I did some tests and found out that my system can record about 75 fps at 1280x1024. After that, the HDD starts to bottleneck it, not letting it get much higher than that. I used a special program for testing the recording speed to ensure that the bottleneck is indeed the HDD and not CPU/GPU.

The HDTune average transfer rate for my fraps drive is 108 MB/s. I believe the F3 has a bit faster speeds, but 1680x1050 is also much higher than 1280x1024. At 60 fps, Any single drive will probably be cutting it close. Of course it also depends on the recorded game.

 

[UpstartXT]

I did some tests and found out that my system can record about 75 fps at 1280x1024. After that, the HDD starts to bottleneck it, not letting it get much higher than that. I used a special program for testing the recording speed to ensure that the bottleneck is indeed the HDD and not CPU/GPU.

The HDTune average transfer rate for my fraps drive is 108 MB/s. I believe the F3 has a bit faster speeds, but 1680x1050 is also much higher than 1280x1024. At 60 fps, Any single drive will probably be cutting it close. Of course it also depends on the recorded game.

Good info. So what would your suggestion be? As far as what game, going to be wanting to record a lot of the new titles as they come out.

 

[drevin]

Good info. So what would your suggestion be? As far as what game, going to be wanting to record a lot of the new titles as they come out.

I suppose if you want to save some money, you could get a single drive with the fastest transfer rates (I'm not sure which one that is, maybe others can help here). It might be just enough to record in that resolution/FPS. Or if you want to be extra sure that the recording always goes smoothly, you could put 2 drives in RAID.

By the way, I did the tests with compression ON. If you want to use the "Force lossless RGB capture" option, the requirements will be even higher.