SSD for Recording

Hi guys, first post here. Are SSDs suitable for recording? I currently have 2 HDDs on my laptop and I've been doing high resolution (720p) gameplay recordings for quite a while now. I record from my Wii U > Capture Card > Laptop. I plan to record on a higher resolution (1080p) because a new game has been released for Wii U that utilizes a 1080p native resolution. I actually tried to record once at 1080p, but my 5400 RPM HDDs can't seem to keep up with the pace.
What do you suggest? Do I have to buy an SSD or a new 7200RPM HDD?

Thanks in advance.

 

SSDs are the closest thing commercially available you have to recording, with the only other thing currently faster is recording straight to a ram drive or buffering to ram itself. SSDs are more than up to the task, and are several times faster than even the best 10,000rpm drives that would have no problem keeping up.

I would recommend using an SSD drive over a magnetic one for anything that you need more speed for response and to lower the latency time.

 

Thank you for that information. These SSDs have been out for quite a while and I've heard how fast it is, but haven't been able to buy one yet. It's really silly considering I'm a gamer.
Anyway, do you have any specific SSDs to recommend? How long, on average, will an SSD last if I use it for recording? I game and record for extended periods of time, so do I have to worry about anything?

 

You're welcome. If you decide to get an SSD, here's some other things you will want to know about it in contrast to magnetic drives, and about keeping it in good shape and a few things to be aware of to keep it lasting as long as you can.

Most of the SSDs on the market will handle constant read and write cycles to the same wear levels and use as a magnetic drive. Expected heavy use it should last at least a minimum of 3 years, and medium use with heavy loads only intermittently it should last about 5 years. The majority of manufacturers guarantee them for at least 2 or 3 years. Some will only guarantee for 1, but it varies. You should get at least 3 or 4 years out of it on average if you use Samsung EVO 840 or EVO 850 drives, and at least 2 or 3 years out of any good PNY, Crucial, or Sandisk SSD (Sandisk was recently purchased by Western Digital, so if you see Western Digital SSDs on the shleves, those are Sandisk drives).

Whether you're using the SSD for recording of games, security video, heavy uploading and downloading like with a server, or are doing some other automated task that constantly writes data to the drive, the life of the drive is determined by how many cells it has and the wear level of each cell. The less expensive drives tend to wear out slightly faster than the more expensive ones, but what they do to compensate is that they transparently move data out of cells that are about to fail and copy them to good cells that are rarely or never used (free space) on the drive.

It's a litle like bad sectors on a magnetic drive, but with the benefit of the drive itself recognizing them and keeping you safe from the loss of them without having to ever run scandisk or any other program to reclaim data from lost clusters or bad sectors. The SSD drive does this for you.

It's important that you don't use defrag on an SSD though. Try to make that a rarity, or like never. The reason why is because when you defrag a magnetic drive (which has a physical motor that reads data slower the more scattered out it gets per file), what the program does is it places the write head at the beginning of an area and rewrites all of the data there. It removes the old data from its previous location, and places it in a line so that magnetic drives can read it faster.

Since you're no longer using a magnetic drive anymore, your SSD is 100% digital and does not need nor see any speed increase whether the data is right next to a cell or a dozen cells away. There isn't going to be a perceived difference by the user for access time like there is on a magnetic drive.

If you try to defrag an SSD, then what it will do is use up valuable cell life and space by removing data where it was stored, and placing it near the front of the drive, rewriting and using up cells it doesn't have to...and it will do this for your entire drive, wasting and wearing out at least one or more cell read and writes per every byte of every file it does this for. You definitely want to avoid that.

When an SSD starts to have too many dead cells or no longer has many free or mostly unused cells to write to anymore, it will start to lose free space (because it will write any cells that die to the free areas first before they do).

When too many cells are saved from loss, the free space on a drive can start to disappear to the point that the paging file and access times slow down some, and if a cell or group of cells are near the end of their cycle for life, they will slow down some on reads. This is just slightly noticed on desktops, but you can see it happening and notice it a lot more on laptops and netbooks, especially when they are on battery power.

Some of the older SSD drives also slow down on speed if they are on powersave with a battery, or if there are any issues reading past a damaged cell to get to good ones. You can usually use utilities that come with a drive to manually mark a bad cell to make it faster again, but some drives require a 3rd party program to do this, since the built-in TRIM of an SSD drive isn't always aware of it. Some are and can do it automatically in hardware, but it depends on the drive and the model.

Even if this happens, it will still be faster than even the best of magnetic drives whether it's running at top speed or reduced speed for whatever the reason.

On my systems here, I have several different drives: PNY 120GB, Sandisk 240GB, Samsung 840 EVO 500GB, and a few Crucial drives that are 60gb and 120gb for older systems. They all see frequent use and constant use daily, and there's been no issues with any of them yet for 2 years. There are one or two other systems I have here with older Samsung SSDs, that are 32GB are nearly 4 years old, and they are still in good shape also.

For performance, I usually recommend Samsung EVO series, but for price and speed balance, PNY or Crucial. Sandisk is always somewhere between these.

 

Wow, I am completely overwhelmed with the massive information your post contains. I appreciate the effort you've put into explaining this to me. It definitely helps me a lot. It saved me a ton of time researching the Internet for this stuff.

Thanks again. These small details are helpful.

Ok, this is good. I am a bit wary to buy SSDs, because I thought it will wear out a lot faster than a HDD if I do heavy write tasks constantly.

I am quite surprised by how much I still have to know about SSDs. I never knew that they had these great features. Now I'm really stoked to buy one.

Yes, I will remember this. I now see the reason why it's completely silent, since discs are eliminated from these drives.

I see, just in case, are there programs that give me information about the health of my SSDs? (I have HD Tune installed)
I've heard that Samsung EVO series are really good SSDs, and I will read reviews and get myself one. It's been years too late.