Need help to buy External Hard Drive for Recording!

[xorkatoss]

Recently I'm having problems recording Warcraft III Blades 'n Gore II footage, I use to be able to play at 60fps and record at 30fps but now I can't for some strange reason.
My fps always drops to 15-22 which is somewhat good but most times it looks laggy in the video=/
I knew that buying an external hard drive is the "trick" to no frame drops and I decided to buy one after gathering some money.

What I'm aiming for is:
-high write speed, already decided to go with 7200rpm (Speed, Expressed in Revolutions Per Minute) since it's the maximum (i think)
-average disk space, around 100GB should be fine (i rarely record more than 100GB gameplay so...)

What do you guys think about this?
Do you know how much this could possibly cost?


EDIT:
After searching e-shop a bit I found that they have a good one

Quick Description Translation

Capacity: 500GB.
Connector Type: USB 3.0 / 2.0 / USB 1.1 port.
Rotational Speed​​: 5400rpm.
Transfer rate: up to 4800 Mbits / second (USB Bus Speed).
Additional Features: Plug and play, no external power supply (USB bus powered), manual 27 languages.
Power: From cable USB 3.0.
Color: Grey.
Weight: 163g.
System Requirements: Windows XP/Vista/7.
Dimensions: 127mm x 82mm x 20mm.
Packaging: Retail.
Warranty: 2 years.

Price: 54.00 €

This is too damn good to ignore it! BUT it's USB 3.00 o.o
Also as I noticed from the other USB 2.00 external hard drives i found, they are pretty slow so i guess USB 3.00 can achieve the maximum speed possible right?
If i use the USB 2.00 port will i be able to record using the 100% of the 5400rpm mentioned in the description?

Can i somehow get a USB 3.00 port in my pc?
Am I in a dead end and now I have to sit in the corner and cry?

 

[Dr Super Good]

-high write speed, already decided to go with 7200rpm (Speed, Expressed in Revolutions Per Minute) since it's the maximum (i think)

Considered a Solid State Disk? Those have write and read speeds far greater than any mechanical drive and do not suffer from fragmentation.

-average disk space, around 100GB should be fine (i rarely record more than 100GB gameplay so...)

Again, something SSD sounds like it would be perfect. With write speeds in the 100MB/sec range that is more than enough.

This is too damn good to ignore it! BUT it's USB 3.00 o.o

You need USB3.0 or another high speed interface otherwise you will be bottlenecked by the transfer bandwidth. USB 2.0 has a transfer rate around 20 MB/second which will bottleneck most drives. This is not a problem with internal hard drives as SATA is more than fast enough to ignore such bottlenecks. Other interfaces like fire wire or, if you use Apple, Apple's own drive interface are considerably faster than USB 2.0 as they are designed for external drive use.

Can i somehow get a USB 3.00 port in my pc?

Not too sure, usually that would require a motherboard change. However there might be plugin PCI cards that offer USB 3.0 ports and the PCI transfer rate should be fast enough to not bottleneck the drive.

Am I in a dead end and now I have to sit in the corner and cry?

I think you need to look at what is causing the problem rather than finding a hacky solution.

I use to be able to play at 60fps and record at 30fps but now I can't for some strange reason. My fps always drops to 15-22 which is somewhat good but most times it looks laggy in the video=/

Does your game frame rate drop to 15-22 FPS? Or does the game still run at 60 FPS but the video drops 8-15 frames per second?

If the game is running at only 15-22 FPS now that means something is bottlenecking its performance (like the map is too resource intensive or a background process). If it is only the video that is suffering from dropped frames then that shows a write bandwidth problem.

Write bandwidth problems that appear over time can be caused in a number of ways.
1. Other (and new) processes are issuing I/O to the backing storage medium at the same time your recording process is resulting in the Operating System having to share available bandwidth between processes. Shutting off these processes during recording will free up bandwidth and reduce the number of frames dropped.
2. File fragmentation on a mechanical drive has limited the amount of consecutive free sectors available for writing. As a result the drive has to move more physically (slow) to write the same amount of data causing a drop in write speed. Running the inbuilt disk defragmenter or creating special partitions for recording will fix this by allowing the file to be written more efficiently.
3. Mechanical wear has caused a drop in disk drive write performance. The only solution to this is to buy a new disk drive and transfer everything across to it. It is often a good thing to do in any case if you suffer from this as slow IO performance can indicate imminent failure in the near future and failure results in data loss. Use performance monitor to check I/O rate during a stress test and if you think it is too slow (fraction of what it should be) then consider backing up and getting a new drive.

There is a final way to improve drive write performance (not sure by how much) but it involves disabling a write safety mechanism and so is not recommended (can cause data loss). By enabling the drive's internal buffer for writing you can increase the write speed. However this comes at the cost of the operating system thinking something has been written (write calls return success) yet the drive still has to actually write it so a sudden loss in power can result in data loss.

Check if the capture program allows you to increase frame buffers or number of processing threads. Larger frame buffers and more processing threads (if you have more cores) can increase performance.

 

[Zakamutt]

Do you need an external drive? If your case has space (and your mobo sufficient connectors, I guess) for one more regular HDD you can avoid all this USB silliness

 

[xorkatoss]

@Dr Super Good
hmm yeah SSD might be better but i don't have a USB 3.00 port/plugin PCI cards and I don't know if I can get one on my current desktop, plus motherboard change meh...I built my computer this year and upgraded the RAM 2-3 months ago, IMO it's too soon for changing something again...

Quick preview of my pc

Game FPS is always a standard 60 FPS, during recording might drop to 55 if in intense battle but it's always high, my recording program is Dxtory which is pretty good and as I already said i use to record at 30fps (had it limited to that so maybe i could in higher fps) and now it drops to 15-22, sometimes might even drop at 10FPS actually, recently i tried the 1280x720 settings and it works fine but it's too bad...I want to be able to record at 1920x1080;/


@Zakamutt
hmm yeah actually I don't need an external drive, i just need another one, but I don't know if my case had space for another one so...

 

[Dr Super Good]

Try defragmenting your hard disk as that may help.

Otherwise get another one and plug it internally using SATA.