HUGE FPS Drop when recording?

[ifreakyftw]

Hey guys, i have HUGE fps drops when recording in battle field 3, i run on high/ultra, at about 70-80 fps average, but when recording i go down to about 40-50 fps, even at places where i have about 150 fps! Also my GPU Usage goes from about 80% on both cards to 30-40%. I Record to an external hard drive, which has worked extremely well before, but for some reason the fps drop dramatically now, theres enough free space on the HDD. Thanks for any help!

My specs if their needed:
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T @ 4GHz
Asus Crosshair V Formula
8GB Corsair XMS3 1333MHz Ram
2x Radeon HD 6950 in CrossfireX
PSU: OCZ ZX1250w 80+ Gold

I use MSI Afterburner for recording.

 

[PhilFrisbie]

Recording to an external hard drive is the worst you could choose to do!

The drop in GPU % means it is waiting idle a long time between frames for the recording software to copy the frame buffer to the hard drive.

 

[xichen2004]

From my experience recording to a normal HDD will cause fps drop. I fixed this issue by switching the output folder to a SSD. Depending wat type of SSD you get or if its connected and supported by sata 6.0 or 3.0, speeds may vary from 250~550mb/s in read and write speed.

 

[The Stealthinator]

Record to a seperate hard disk (internal blank, preferably), or to an SSD as that would be faster.

 

[johneh77]

The TekSyndicate noticed in a review a huge difference with more cores also.

http://teksyndicate.com/videos/amd-fx-8350-vs-intel-3570k-vs-3770k-vs-3820-gaming-and-xsplit-streaming-benchmarks