Best SSD for 1080p/60 fps Game Recording?

[Matthew-san]

I currently have two 1TB HDD's that I use for both playing games and recording them. I play one game on one hard drive while I record the gameplay on the other. Unfortunately though neither of my hard drives seem up to the task of recording at 1080p/60 fps. I get a smooth recording at 1080p\30 fps and sometimes I even get away with 1080p/40 fps but I can't record at 50 fps let alone 60. I'm in the market for a 500GB SSD that I can record gameplay at 1080p/60 fps. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[tohka yoto]

i would recomend a kinston sandisk of crucial are all very fast and good

 

[Traciatim]

Pretty much any of them. Though sustained sequential writes aren't all that much different on a spinning disk than an SSD anyway... at least nothing like the huge increase you see on seek based reading and writing (like random access patterns or reading from multiple files).

Are you really sure it's your hard drive that can't keep up? If you are not compressing the video at all 1920x1080x3x60 = 355MiB a second, which means you'd fill a 500GB SSD in 23 minutes. Then sure i can see a spinning disk not doing that unless you have a decent clear RAID setup.

If you are compressing it in some way then the drive probably only has to write at the very most a tenth of that, or about 35MB/s, which on sequential writes almost any drive can do.

For instance, if you are using a video compression that records your video at 50Mbps that means you are essentially writing 6MiB/s to your drive. If your drive can't do that you have some serious problems with your drive. Yet compressing 355MiB/s down to 6MiB/s is no easy task. Which is why I asked if you are sure it's your drives.

What are you using for your recording, and what settings are you using?

 

[mrmez]

Are you sure it's the HDD?
Once you load a game/level it should all be in the RAM, there shouldn't be much HDD usage, and recording at 1080/60 is a pretty easy task. My GoPro can record 4k/30 to a micro sd card half the size of my fingernail, I'm sure a HDD can keep up.

Likely your CPU is reaching it's limit, but without knowing what system you have we can't say.

 

[Matthew-san]

No I am not sure if it is my hard drives, I only assumed it was. I am very new to recording and editing gameplay so I am not sure what the problem is. Here's my system specifications:

OS: Windows 10 64-bit Home
MOBO: ASRock Z97 Extreme3
CPU: i5-4690k
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Superclocked w/ACX Cooler 2.0
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Blue 16GB 1600MHz
PSU: Corsair HX850i
HDDs: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM & Hitachi 1TB 7200 RPM (possibly 5400 RPM)

It's a pretty high-end gaming rig especially since I only game on one 144 Hz, 1080p gaming monitor so I can't imagine any of components being too slow for recording at 1080p/60fps other than the hard drives (especially the Hitachi HDD).

 

[Traciatim]

What are you using to record... and does 1080p/60 work fine if you use shadowplay on the same drive?

 

[Matthew-san]

Also, I've been using MSI Afterburner to record gameplay. I'm not sure about Shadowplay. I'm using some kind of beta for Nvidia GeForce Experience and Shadowplay doesn't even show up for me. There's a Share option which is pretty much the same thing as Shadowplay but I haven't found any options to change the quality of the recording.

 

[mrmez]

Playing at 1080/144 is no small task.
Try reducing your monitor refresh rate to 60hz for a start and try again.
If it helps, your system is too slow for both, if it doesnt...

Obviously, see what sort of compression/file sizes you have. You'll get diminishing quality improvements for anything over ~200Mb/min i reckon.

 

[Traciatim]

The reason I ask is I'm not sure that afterburner does GPU based compression. Which means your CPU is already pretty busy trying to play a game and if it's asked to also do some really heavy video compression at the same time then it's likely that is what's causing your video not to be recorded properly. I'm not very familiar with other screen capture software, but if you find something that supports GPU based compression you'd probably have much better luck since the video cards have hardware on them specific for encoding and decoding video streams, which means you don't notice the performance impact anywhere near as much.

Perhaps start by trying the regular NVidia drivers and see if Shadowplay helps. If that's the case then you can either just use that for the capture or you can start a search for other software that does GPU compression if you don't like the way Shadowplay works for you.

 

[Matthew-san]

I haven't tried very many types of screen capture software but I'll look into ones that are less demanding. Also, would my performance improve if I were to use a capture card instead?