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Hey all,

So, I want to set up my first Raid 0 array to use with FRAPS for recording my pvp awesomeness. Just want to be sure I check all the correct boxes before I make some purchases. I'll be using the gaming rig in my sig.

I have the licensed version of FRAPS and I want to do full-size 1080p recording at 60fps. Currently, recording to an older 250gb drive, I can decent results, but only at lower frame rates and/or half size. I'd be willing to sacrifice some FPS, but I do want full size.

I was going to use my motherboard's (ASrock Extreme 4) built in raid functionality. I was going to keep my SSD on the 6.0 sata port and use 2 of the other 3.0 ports for the raid array. I was going to check the manual on this, but I can't download the file at work.

For drives, I was thinking of using two 1TB Toshibas or 2 1 TB Western Digital Blues. I'd like to keep the cost of the drives to about $120 total, but I can bump that up to $160 if something like a set of 1 TB Western Digital Blacks are needed.

Any thoughts? Good to go? Thanks as always!

I'm not sure how big your SSD is, how much free space you have, or how the length of videos you plan to record. However, I would suggest instead of investing in a RAID 0 setup, consider if you could meet your needs with the hardware you already have - just record to your SSD (it is more resilient than mechanical hard drives anyway) and copy the files you want to save to backup or your HDD if you need to conserve space on the SSD.

If I understand correctly, the real point of the RAID 0 array is to provide fast writable storage so it can record at high FPS. Once the video is recorded, you don't need the fast storage for actually storing the videos long term. While RAID 0 HDDs will alleviate FPS drops in recording -- compared to a single comparable HDD -- it still has potential spool up times and seek times that don't exist in a SSD.

You are talking about investing in 2 x 1TB drives, which is far more space than you require for recording videos. For around the same price, you could get 1 decent sized SSD which will be more reliable than 2x HDDs in RAID 0 (if either fails, the array is broken and all data on it is lost) or a small SSD and a 1TB drive for longer term storage, if you don't already have any other storage available. You may already have enough space on your current SSD for recording though, in which case you may not need to spend anything, or half as much, for longer term storage.

[quote="MJZ82"]I'm not sure how big your SSD is, how much free space you have, or how the length of videos you plan to record. However, I would suggest instead of investing in a RAID 0 setup, consider if you could meet your needs with the hardware you already have - just record to your SSD (it is more resilient than mechanical hard drives anyway) and copy the files you want to save to backup or your HDD if you need to conserve space on the SSD.
quote]

Definitely considered that, but I only run about 100gb free on my 250gb SSD and FRAPS recordings can get pretty large pretty fast since its a few GBs a minute. So, a 10 minute recording could easily be 30gbs or more. I'd be fine with the recordings going in at 30fps since that's all Youtube will show, but FRAPS can't do 30fps recording while the game is at 60fps. I may have to get DXtory for that.

A single 128gb or 250gb SSD may do the trick, but I liked the idea of a larger place to store the videos. Just want to see if the Raid 0 would meet my needs well. Also, for sequential writes, I don't think SSDs outperform HDDs by much, if at all.

Do you have any need to keep the video around after you've uploaded it? If not, a pair of mechanicals will likely suit you just fine. I'd stick to 7200 RPM drives just to be sure you've got enough bandwidth. Short-stroke them as well (maybe 250 GB per?) for faster seeks and better throughput assuming you don't need massive amounts of space.

Waco wrote:

Do you have any need to keep the video around after you've uploaded it? If not, a pair of mechanicals will likely suit you just fine. I'd stick to 7200 RPM drives just to be sure you've got enough bandwidth. Short-stroke them as well (maybe 250 GB per?) for faster seeks and better throughput assuming you don't need massive amounts of space.

I wouldn't be continually recording. I'd probably do a few 10-15 minute segments a night that could then get shifted over to long term storage. Short stroking would work nice to get peak writes and 500gb total space would be plenty for a night's worth of gaming. Then the completed recordings could be sent over to the 1.5gb other (long stroked?) section for long term storage.

Exactly - and if you need to make sure the data is resilient (at least in terms of not losing anything to HDD failure) you could use something like 200 GB of each disk for a striped array (400 GB total) and then have an 800 GB mirrored array with the remainder of the disks.

Are you aware that both your CPU and your GPU have built-in H264 encoders? Granted, H264 video is not ideal for editing, but I think it's worth a try before you spend money on a bunch of HDDs.

Firestarter wrote:

Are you aware that both your CPU and your GPU have built-in H264 encoders? Granted, H264 video is not ideal for editing, but I think it's worth a try before you spend money on a bunch of HDDs.

Sorry, I don't follow. Please connect the dots for me. Are you talking about encoding on the fly or something?



What I'm going to do tonight is try out DXtory. Seems like it can get better results than FRAPS for a much lower resource cost, so my older HDD may be able to keep up with the writing demands. Plus, it can record at lower resolutions and FPS while the game plays at higher.

I recently grabbed a 3TB Green drive for $109. Benchmarks say that it's actually faster than one of my older Black drives in most measurements, likely due to higher density platters. I would imagine this would be more than sufficient as far as speed, and alot easier than screwing around with RAID arrays.

The Egg wrote:

I recently grabbed a 3TB Green drive for $109. Benchmarks say that it's actually faster than one of my older Black drives in most measurements, likely due to higher density platters. I would imagine this would be more than sufficient as far as speed, and alot easier than screwing around with RAID arrays.

Interesting. Guess I may have to look into getting a 2tb regular drive (don't want to mess with a green drive for this) and then just short stroking that to 400gb. That may get me the performance I need if DXtory doesn't work out.

Record a few short 1080p clips of various sizes to your SSD. Divide the size of the file by the amount of seconds in the clip, and you should get a ballpark of the bandwidth needed. I'd be willing to bet that your old 250GB is just p*ss slow and a Green would be sufficient, but if you're concerned just grab a 2TB Black or something along those lines.

southrncomfortjm wrote:

Firestarter wrote:

Are you aware that both your CPU and your GPU have built-in H264 encoders? Granted, H264 video is not ideal for editing, but I think it's worth a try before you spend money on a bunch of HDDs.

Sorry, I don't follow. Please connect the dots for me. Are you talking about encoding on the fly or something?

Yes, I'm talking about H264 encoding on the fly. I'm using A's Video Encoder with Bluesky Video Capture right now to capture my gaming sessions in H264 compressed video with my HD7950. The performance impact is minimal and I get great quality with ~12 megabit/s. Bandicam also supports AMDs VCE, and there's an open source VFW VCE codec ( https://github.com/jackun/openencodevfw ) that should work with various capture programs (I tested it with MSI Afterburner). There's also the option of using the H264 encoder baked into your CPU, the latest versions of Open Broadcast Software support it.

Here's a video that I captured using A's Video Encoder, playing Planetside 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpb-tvpTYww
I recorded about 7 minutes worth of footage, filesize was about 600mb (bitrate set to 12Mbps).

edit: keep in mind that the quality of the file is a lot better than what you end up seeing on youtube

You can't argue with the superior image quality that FRAPS offers, but its videos take up sooooooooo much space.

I'm pretty happy with shadowplay, but DXTory with x264vfw is a good FRAPS alternative and can save you a ton of HDD space. You will just have to tweak the quality settings to your liking.

Tutorial here if you're interested.

The Egg wrote:

Record a few short 1080p clips of various sizes to your SSD. Divide the size of the file by the amount of seconds in the clip, and you should get a ballpark of the bandwidth needed. I'd be willing to bet that your old 250GB is just p*ss slow and a Green would be sufficient, but if you're concerned just grab a 2TB Black or something along those lines.

Yep, that 250gb is really slow. The benchmark in DXtory pegged it at about 55mbs, about half what I need for top quality recording. Since I'm not really worried about power consumption I'd probably go with a short stroked 2TB 7200rpm drive. Gotta say though, DXtory works really well even with what I have now - put it on to record at 30fps (can still play at 60), set recording resolution to 720p, and then reduce image quality a bit and my old Samsung Spinpoint can keep up pretty well.

Firestarter wrote:

Yes, I'm talking about H264 encoding on the fly. I'm using A's Video Encoder with Bluesky Video Capture right now to capture my gaming sessions in H264 compressed video with my HD7950. The performance impact is minimal and I get great quality with ~12 megabit/s. Bandicam also supports AMDs VCE, and there's an open source VFW VCE codec ( https://github.com/jackun/openencodevfw ) that should work with various capture programs (I tested it with MSI Afterburner). There's also the option of using the H264 encoder baked into your CPU, the latest versions of Open Broadcast Software support it.

Here's a video that I captured using A's Video Encoder, playing Planetside 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpb-tvpTYww
I recorded about 7 minutes worth of footage, filesize was about 600mb (bitrate set to 12Mbps).

edit: keep in mind that the quality of the file is a lot better than what you end up seeing on youtube

I'll check this out too since I don't edit the videos.

Your video looks really solid. What kind of storage do you use?

southrncomfortjm wrote:

Your video looks really solid. What kind of storage do you use?

The video as recorded was even better, I deleted the original but I made a comparison of a single frame of another video:
Comparison frames: http://imgur.com/a/UED4Z (recompressed again by imgur..)
Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkbxsJ4DHA0

The comparison is not ideal due to the image host transcoding the image again, but the difference is still pretty obvious.

I record on my SSD as I don't have any spinny platters in my computer right now, so space is a bit tight. Obviously I don't have to worry about storage performance this way, but I doubt that would be much of a problem at ~2 Mbyte/s.

So, I found my solution.

I gave the program Dxtory a try and it is rather amazing. You can find it here. It costs 3600 yen, and with Paypal's conversion, it came out to about $36.

With that program, my very old 250gb Samsung Spinpoint (7200 rpm) with a sequential write speed of about 58mbs could seamlessly record 720p at 30fps with 3 audio streams. Hitting the record button did not drop my frame rate by an amount that I could notice, unlike FRAPS which tanked my FPS.

Like I mentioned earlier, DXtory is able to record at a lower resolution and lower frame rate than that at which you play, so I was able to play at 1080p60 while recording at 720p30. Recording at that lower resolution and rate also kept the file size manageable. Seemed to be about 1GB per minute of recording in my limited testing. I'll hopefully remember to post a sample video tonight when I get everything set up and do some PVP.

Anyways, thanks all for the help!