Stupid question but...

[Ivy Bridge]

It's my HDD speed that is bottlenecking me recording at 1080P, right? I get all sorts of microstutter while recording at 1080P when I definitely shouldn't and the displayed FPS is usually never below 100, so I'm pretty sure it's not the GPU, so I assume it would be my HDDs slow write speeds? Would a dedicated HDD for recording be sufficient or would I need to ugprade to an SSD or a RAID array?

Not trying to hear about RAID failure rates, it's practically negligible until you've got like 4 or more drives and it's only going to be for recordings so it's not like crucial info that would be lost.

 

[szskateman22]

Just out of curiosity, what are your RAM & CPU sizes/speeds? It could be a limitation there as well. If you decide to go for anything, go for a SSD as they are superior to any HDD set-up you have. HOWEVER, the SSD is only spin-up reduction (to zero) and possibly write times - although I don't believe it increases the speed of write time.

 

[Ivy Bridge]

Just out of curiosity, what are your RAM & CPU sizes/speeds? It could be a limitation there as well. If you decide to go for anything, go for a SSD as they are superior to any HDD set-up you have. HOWEVER, the SSD is only spin-up reduction (to zero) and possibly write times - although I don't believe it increases the speed of write time.

Nah, it's not the CPU/RAM. I'm like 90% positive it's the HDD write times, but just wanted some second opinions. I have an i5 2500k @ 4.2GHz, 8GB DDR3 1600 RAM, and a GTX 480. All I'm trying to record is some COD: MW2 gameplay and it NEVER falls below 100 FPS on the counter so I'm pretty sure the microstutter and choppy gameplay/recording is from the HDDs write times not being able to keep up. Just wanted to be sure before I thought about sinking the money into it.

Also SSDs have significantly faster writes than a hard disk, otherwise I wouldn't even be considering one for recording and you'd be surprised how much performance you can get out of a 4 drive RAID0 tbh. Wouldn't at all be surprised at reads of like 250mb/s, writes like 200mb/s which is more than enough for 1080P recording and I'd get a much larger capacity solution (15 minute gameplays are like 35GB in uncompressed 1080p) so it's a serious consideration to make. I could get like 8TB of writable data for the same price as I could for a ~120GB SSD, with a significant performance drop but since what I'm gonna be doing is calling for large spaces I'm kinda leaning towards RAID0, or at least a dedicated recording drive. For example, say I want to record BF3 gameplay.. odds are the games are gonna last anywhere from 15-30 minutes, possibly longer. A 120GB SSD will fill up after 2-4 games, so I'd have to take breaks constantly to transfer the data over to my storage drive.

 

[Ivy Bridge]

Bump, would like an opinion from someone just so I can feel safe on assuming it's the write speeds