[HELP]SSD care and usage

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LeroyHarr

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I would say no, its probably not a good idea for an ssd. The more writes you do to an ssd the degraded it's performance. I wouldn't recommend it.
 
You can use a SSD for FRAPS, but it is rather expensive.

You can write a couple of hundred thousand times over the same space on a SSD before it will start giving problems. From my own experience, there is no way that you'll ever do THAT many recordings to do damage to the SSD. Your only issue with the SSD would be the space available and the price per GB.

You can get a 2TB hard drive for the price of a 120GB SSD. Most hard drives nowadays can deliver pretty good sequential read & write speeds (limited to like 100MB/s).
SSD's are more suited to random read & write operations, where hard drives are extremely slow. When you're doing recordings, most of your files will be sequential read/write operations.

So my verdict would be to stick with hard drives.
 
My personal verdict would be to get a standard hdd (say a decent 1TB with good read - write speeds) and get a ssd cache drive (what I am going to do), and run it like that.

This way you get the speed of an ssd (by using it as a cache drive), and you also get all the space you require (and I doubt you would be doing as much writing to your ssd cache drive than using a ssd direct).

Just my 2 cents ;)
 
Pada said:
You can use a SSD for FRAPS, but it is rather expensive.

You can write a couple of hundred thousand times over the same space on a SSD before it will start giving problems. From my own experience, there is no way that you'll ever do THAT many recordings to do damage to the SSD. Your only issue with the SSD would be the space available and the price per GB.

You can get a 2TB hard drive for the price of a 120GB SSD. Most hard drives nowadays can deliver pretty good sequential read & write speeds (limited to like 100MB/s).
SSD's are more suited to random read & write operations, where hard drives are extremely slow. When you're doing recordings, most of your files will be sequential read/write operations.

So my verdict would be to stick with hard drives.
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snail said:
My personal verdict would be to get a standard hdd (say a decent 1TB with good read - write speeds) and get a ssd cache drive (what I am going to do), and run it like that.

This way you get the speed of an ssd (by using it as a cache drive), and you also get all the space you require (and I doubt you would be doing as much writing to your ssd cache drive than using a ssd direct).

Just my 2 cents ;)
Click to expand...

Good suggestions. Thanks guys. Can any of you recommend a really good HDD then? I had a peek at the velociraptor, expensive but good speeds! any other ideas?

Can games be run off of the SSD?
 
LeroyHarr said:
Good suggestions. Thanks guys. Can any of you recommend a really good HDD then? I had a peek at the velociraptor, expensive but good speeds! any other ideas?

Can games be run off of the SSD?
Click to expand...

Yes but note than only the load times will be affected not the performance. So if you install a game for example Battlefield 3, the time it takes to load the next map will be hugely improved, but the FPS will stay the same (GPU/CPU dependent)

A few tips for SSD:

1. NEVER DEFRAGMENT A SSD

2. If you can change the directories of your Documents folders to a hard drive.

3. Change your desktop location to a hard drive if possible.
 
Something you can also consider instead of an SSD, since you seem to want to use it mainly for fraps....

Make a RAM drive. Basically it turns a portion of your RAM into a harddisk and you can read/write data on it at blazing speeds. We used to do this for our Minecraft servers Works like a charm...
 
froot said:
Something you can also consider instead of an SSD, since you seem to want to use it mainly for fraps....

Make a RAM drive. Basically it turns a portion of your RAM into a harddisk and you can read/write data on it at blazing speeds. We used to do this for our Minecraft servers Works like a charm...
Click to expand...

But how does that work if I only have 8 gigs of RAM? Surely it would be tiny? Seems to be quite complicated :/

@NomNom

Thanks. I guess I will install most used programs on the SSD. Maybe some of my series too.
 
How big are your fraps recordings? You shouldn't require more than say 2GB? (remember, a RAM drive is cleared each time you log off/reboot). Once you've recorded them you copy it on a hard disk.
 
froot said:
How big are your fraps recordings? You shouldn't require more than say 2GB? (remember, a RAM drive is cleared each time you log off/reboot). Once you've recorded them you copy it on a hard disk.
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You obviously need to read up more on FRAPS, hehe.

4 minutes is about 3.5 - 4 GB for me. Recording Minecraft, 720P, 30 FPS.

Even Bigger for CSS or BattleField.

I would hate to record for a minute, copy everything onto a HDD then start recording again. Makes a tedious task that much more tedious.
 
LeroyHarr said:
You obviously need to read up more on FRAPS, hehe.

4 minutes is about 3.5 - 4 GB for me. Recording Minecraft, 720P, 30 FPS.

Even Bigger for CSS or BattleField.

I would hate to record for a minute, copy everything onto a HDD then start recording again. Makes a tedious task that much more tedious.
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You should have said you're doing it the hardcore method ;)
 
You can always get a Socket 2011 motherboard with 64GB of RAM - then a RAM drive would work very well - until Eskom decides it has to be time for a blackout :p

Froot, my CS1.6 recordings was about 20MB/s when I recorded at 25fps, because you have to work in raw/uncompressed format to get the best results.

Any hard drive would do, but one with a longer warranty (2 - 5 years) would be recommended. Unfortunately the Western Digital Black Edition drives aren't as cheap as they were a few months ago :(
 
Been using an SSD for a while now. It made my 13" Macbook feel like a whole new machine. Went with the SSD after 2 normal drives broke.

There are many opinions but I do not think that there is any reason to avoid it unless you need lots of hard drive space.

Some say that benchmarking an SSD is a sure way to kill it so I've benchmarked mine MANY times to try and kill it. I also copy many large files to it before moving them elsewhere. Still works 100%

Everything breaks eventually. Normal hard drives too.

I'm also a big fan of the Velociraptor hard drives due to the reliability. They are quite noisy though. Not a fan of anything with a Seagate label due to poor reliability.
 
Pada said:
You can always get a Socket 2011 motherboard with 64GB of RAM - then a RAM drive would work very well - until Eskom decides it has to be time for a blackout :p

Froot, my CS1.6 recordings was about 20MB/s when I recorded at 25fps, because you have to work in raw/uncompressed format to get the best results.

Any hard drive would do, but one with a longer warranty (2 - 5 years) would be recommended. Unfortunately the Western Digital Black Edition drives aren't as cheap as they were a few months ago :(
Click to expand...

Well fortunately Eskom can't reach me :P FRAPS file sizes are ridiculous, but they are Raw and give very good results. Amazing quality... which also depends on how you render them.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-336-WD this WD looks quite good. Good Price too.

I did actually forget to mention that my FRAPS is being recorded onto an external 1TB WD. I am sure that this could be a huge problem with write speeds??

I think a new internal 3.5 (good quality) should get the job done. But am def getting the SSD too. Need to chuck windows on it as my PC has a cold boot time of about 5 minutes +- a few mins :P

@ Jimmeh

The velociraptor looks like a mean machine. Friends got one and he aint worried about noise, but rather the heat that thing churns out.

Will def look into it more.
 
If you're currently using a USB 2.0 external drive/casing, I would recommend that you rather use an internal drive for recording to raw files.

Velociraptor drives are way too expensive.
 
LeroyHarr said:
Agreed, but I do need something a little faster and I guess anything is faster than an external.
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You consider a RAID0 then? You can get speeds in excess of 180MB/s. You sacrifice access time, but access time isn't a factor with something like FRAPS.
 
froot: it is rather pointless to have 180MB/s transfer speeds when you're only recording at 30MB/s.

With video editing/encoding, the problem is usually the encoding speed limitation of the CPU/GPU.
 
Pada said:
froot: it is rather pointless to have 180MB/s transfer speeds when you're only recording at 30MB/s.

With video editing/encoding, the problem is usually the encoding speed limitation of the CPU/GPU.
Click to expand...

I agree, but read the post I quoted.... he wants something faster than 90-120MB/s ?
 
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