Extra HDD for making movies worth it???

[mad pistol]

I've recently figured out that I can easily record movies @ 720P with reasonable success on my PC. I seem to have run into a snag though.

Specs:
E6600 @ 3.2Ghz
2GB Corsair DDR2 @712mhz (synced w/ FSB)
9800 GTX+
500 GB HDD
700-watt OCZ GameXStream PSU

My problem is that when I try to record a high performance game, such as Crysis or Warhead, the game lags quite a bit. I think it's because the game is designed to pull data from the HDD a lot. However, when I'm recording a game @ 720P at around 50-60fps, the raw data being produced by FRAPS is pretty heavy, so it's eating up HDD bandwidth, and thus, Crysis lags like hell.

So, if I got another HDD, like a 640GB Western Digital drive and used it as a dedicated movie recording HDD, would that be enough to reduce or stop the lag? I think it would work because it would free up the bandwidth between the HDD and memory for games, and it would also open another channel for movies between the CPU and another HDD, so in theory, it should reduce or eliminate my current problem.

Am I correct? What are your suggestions?

 

[bigbaddabooma]

nope.its gonna lag no matter what.

 

[mad pistol]

nope.its gonna lag no matter what.

But it doesn't lag when not recording the video. It means that data bandwidth is being strained between the HDD and memory, and I can guarantee that the memory is not holding back the HDD.

I'd also appreciate it if you'd give me a more descriptive answer than "No it won't work." If you're going to say that, tell me why you think that.

 

[bigbaddabooma]

But it doesn't lag when not recording the video. It means that data bandwidth is being strained between the HDD and memory.

I'd also appreciate it if you'd give me a more descriptive answer than "No it won't work." If you're going to say that, tell me why you think that.

you just answered your own question.yea its not going to lag when not recording.
when recording your useing a lot of your HD and a lot of ram and cpu power.
when playing your using your HD cpu and ram. crysis is one of the few games that uses duelcore technolgy.so when your recording your useing about 100% of both cores to do that task, playing and recording.

 

[ScrappyDoo]

Madpistol,

Short answer: Maybe.

Longer answer: Depends on a lot more variables than you're telling us. The first and biggest which come to mind is your hard drive AND your motherboard. What are they?

 

[ScrappyDoo]

Have you run any benchmarks/performance tests when using FRAPS? That'd be helpful too.

 

[mad pistol]

Current HDD is a 500GB Western Digital Caviar SATA 3.0Gb/s drive. The motherboard is an EVGA 680i SLI.

The reason that I think this should work is because when I start a game of some sort, the framerate is pretty good. Usually between 30-50 fps on most games, and it is fairly smooth. Of course, there are small hiccups here and there, but nothing major.

The MAJOR issue comes in when I hit largely congested areas where it's no longer possible to run the entire game in the RAM, and the Hard Drive has to be accessed to retrieve more data. I'm not sure that this is 100% true, but usually when you're saving something to the HDD, it bogs down if you try to access something else from the same drive simultaneously.

So, my theory is with 2 different drives; one for games and the other for media/movies and recording, everything will flow much more smoothly. It won't increase performance of the computer, but it will cut down on the choking/sputtering/lagging that you experience when a game has to load from the Hard Drive. Since the HDD with the games on it won't get bogged down recording movies that it'll be free to easily load game data as needed, and vice versa with the movie/media drive.



For referrence, my system runs virtually flawlessly on nearly every game I have when running at 720P. That includes Crysis.