Upgrading my storage - advice?

[lehtv]

Currently I have:

OCZ Vertex 2 120GB from 2011
WD Green 1TB from 2009
Samsung 2TB 5400RPM from 2011

All of these are about 80% full.

The reason for upgrading / adding storage is mostly to do with needing space for high quality gaming footage. I'm planning on using Dxtory with Lagarith Lossless codec, it outputs about 1.5gb per minute at 1080p@30fps. The upgrade is also motivated by the fact that my SSD is getting a bit old and can't fit all the stuff I'd like it to fit, and that I don't really have any proper backup setup. I don't think I can currently afford to have doubles of absolutely everything, so I was thinking I'd move my WD Green 1TB out of daily use and just store backups of the more important files there.

So I'm going to need
1. 2TB or more storage with good write speed (I don't think RAID 0 is required for the recording footage, do you?)
2. Somewhere to move 800GB of data from my to-be backup drive, doesn't need to be high performance
3. Preferably new SSD; this would free up my Vertex for other uses, but what? It would also free up between 100-200 GB from my 2TB drive.

I don't have an exact set budget but I'd prefer not to overpay . This is what I have available (not a conclusive list):

Product	                    Warranty  Price EUR	  GB per EUR
WD1003FZEX 1TB 7200RPM      5         67.74       13.75
WD2003FZEX 2TB 7200RPM      5	      124.60      14.95
WD3003FZEX 3TB 7200RPM      5         159.91      17.47
WD4003FZEX 4TB 7200RPM      5         216.14      17.23
HGST 0S03593 2TB 7200RPM    5         125.69      14.82
ST2000DM001 2TB 7200RPM     2         87.90       21.19
ST3000DM001 3TB 7200RPM     2         109.90      25.42
Crucial M500 480GB          3         236.21      1.89
Crucial M500 240GB          3         116.82      1.91
Samsung 840 EVO 250GB       3         151.90      1.53

I'm leaning towards WD Blacks just for the warranty and the fact that the updated Blacks apparently perform very nicely. Those Seagates on the other hand are so cheap that it's hard to overlook them... As for the SSD, I'm leaning towards M500 480GB since there's a performance difference compared to the 240GB drive, it's not a lot more than 840 EVO 240GB, and the high capacity has a certain future proofness to it, similar to what a 240GB drive would've had for me when I bought the OCZ Vertex (thus I wouldn't now need an SSD upgrade).

Recommendations?

 

[denis280]

For the WD Black no doubt.and the Samsung 840 evo runs Great.i have both on my system.and no regrets.

 

[Cerb]

The recording should be fine on any HDD, being only 25MBps@30FPS. 3-4 times that shouldn't be a problem, so long as the drive doesn't get full, and you make sure that HDD is doing nothing else.

You're spot on with the bigger SSD. With lots of free space for TRIM, and choosing newer drives, differences between them are pretty much nil, with only minor differences in large sequential copying, until you need combined random writing and reading (DBs, multiple VMs w/ dynamic disks, etc.). If you're building a machine that might push it, you may as well spend a wee bit more on a known-faster SSD. It's a cheap way to stack the deck, in the scheme of things, when building. But, a gaming PC isn't going to push the limits of practically any newer SSD, save maybe a Phison-based one, or a small one with only 1-2 channels filled (like 60GB or 120GB models with ~20nm NAND).

 

[lehtv]

Provided enough disk performance, would recording raw video have less effect on framerates in CPU limited scenarios, since the CPU wouldn't have to compress the video on the fly? I'm sort of having trouble keeping 60 fps in Planetside 2 while recording to x264 or Lagarith Lossless, I'd need to OC my CPU more but even that might not be enough.

 

[Cerb]

1920x1080x3Bpp -> 6,220,800B
30f/s -> 186,624,000B/s
60s/min -> 11,197,440,000B/min
2^30 B/GB -> 10.43GiB/min

So, just shy of 90 minutes per TB, if the above is right. One HDD alone would not do it, as I get 178MBps, if raw capture is, as assumed above, 8 bits per color channel per pixel. That's right near the limit of current 7200RPM HDDs.

Given that, I think you'd have to find people who've done it, to see. The HDDs can handle it, in RAID 0. But, can Windows handle it, while providing reasonably smooth gameplay?

 

[lehtv]

Interesting. I don't really require raw capture for the quality (nor can I really afford the disk space required for it), Dxtory with Lagarith Lossless is pretty nice. Was just wondering if there was less CPU overhead in recording raw versus Lagarith.

And on that topic, I was told on Planetside 2 forums that Dxtory will give the best performance if recording in RawCap format, using one drive purely for recording, and another drive for storing the files. I'm not sure how that works exactly but it looks like that's the way I'll be going. So I'm probably going to need another hard drive in addition to the drive where I'm going to store my footage. I wonder if this means the size of the recording drive is not important, and the speed of the storage drive is likewise unimportant...

 

[Cerb]

That last post gave me the keywords I needed. Looks like I was right on my bandwidth needs at the highest quality, but that you can reduce the recorded quality to get 1080P with less bandwidth, with YUV formats. Also, that Dxtory apparently supports splitting the recording itself, so you don't need to have a RAID, just 2 matched HDDs, to do higher bandwidth recording.

Given that, it looks like you could get a single new 2 or 3 TB drive, see how it goes, then add another if you're not happy with it. With nearly 3 hours fitting in 2TB, and expecting 5:1 to 10:1 compression later, I would think capacity would be fine, in the end. If you're more after what's going on than HQ video, the lowest quality YUVs would likely do fine, though you're into lossy recording, at that point.

 

[lehtv]

So the way it works it records raw frame output onto the recording disk, then as the recording is finished, it uses the codec to compress it into a video file that is then saved on the storage drive? Are you sure the drives have to be identical, that I can't use a 1TB single platter WD black for recording, and a 3TB drive for storage?

I already have YV12 enabled in the Lagarith Lossless codec settings because I want to be able to fit dozens of hours of footage onto one disk if needed. RGB mode would take considerably more space and the image quality difference is not noticeable to me, whereas the difference between Lagarith and x264 is noticeable. I guess I won't have to touch this setting if I decide to do it in RawCap mode

 

[Cerb]

It says it can split the recording as it does it, striping across them at a file level, then put it back together later. So, you might be able to do full quality without a RAID 0, just two separate HDDs (but, I wouldn't want drives too different from each other for such a setup). But, the YUV formats probably drop the bandwidth down enough for one HDD, as long as it's new.

Nothing to do with a recording drive and storage drive, though you definitely want that. You can only effectively record at up to the drive's slowest burst speed, so you want that drive doing nothing but recording, and want it not to be filled up with other files, that could end up causing random IO instead of sequential.

 

[lehtv]

Bought two WD Black 3TB WD3003FZEX. I'm planning to use a 500-600GB partition from the beginning of each drive for the raw caps, which I'll then convert to .avi with Lagarith Lossless and store on the first disk's remaining portion. The rest of the second disk I can use for whatever.

EDIT: the idea is that by writing every other frame on the other disk, it's possible to record raw footage without requiring particularly fast disk performance, and the fact that there's no compression being done while recording, makes it easier on the CPU. This is important to me because I can notice slight uneven playback in the recorded footage whenever there's a drop below the stable 60 fps, and almost all the drops are caused by CPU limit

Leaving the SSD upgrade for later... I'll jump on it when I can get a 480+ GB drive for less than 200 eur.