I’ve talked a lot about utilizing a secondary hard drive for recording videos on my channel.
Be it with XSplit, OBS Studio, Elgato Game Capture HD, or anything else - a secondary
hard drive or Solid State Drive, physically different from your main OS C:\ drive, is
almost a requirement in my book for recording videos to your computer.
But I’ve never really gone into detail (in video form) as to why you should use a second
drive.
Let’s talk about that.
I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier to understand and more fun via free educational
videos.
There are two main reasons that you’d want to use a secondary disk drive to record to
- bottlenecking issues affecting the performance and quality of your recording, and the durability
of your system on the whole.
The biggest issue that you’re going to care about the most is your system bottlenecking
- this means that something in your computer is restricting performance to everything else.
In this case, your hard drive is the bottleneck - your primary hard drive, the C:\ drive in
Windows, is already being constantly used and accessed to run your operating system,
various programs, and probably even your game (if you’re gaming on PC).
This means a lot of data is being sent back and forth - and if you’re on a standard
mechanical hard drive, then the platters are already doing a lot of spinning and reading.
If you try to record - an intensive process involving a lot of data being transferred
- to this drive, you can easily run into performance issues.
Your whole system could slow down or lock up, or your recording can get messed up.
There can be visual artifacts in the footage, such as a lot of pixelization or random glitching,
or it might not be able to keep up with the frame rate.
You don’t want super stuttery video.
You just don’t.
Recording to a secondary drive that is only being accessed for the purpose of recording
means a free flow of information with minimal performance issues or issues.
Secondly, constantly recording to your OS hard drive can actually decrease the durability
of your computer - especially if you’re on a laptop.
Laptop hard drives (or other weaker hard drives) only operate at 5400 RPM - versus the 7200
RPM of bigger desktop hard drives - and aren’t made for constant writing like that.
Abusing the hard drive means you could wake up one day after rendering a video overnight
to find that your PC will only give you a sad blue screen.
I’ve seen it plenty of times.
So what can you do to prevent any of this from happening?
Use a secondary disk drive.
How you go about this, exactly, depends on your setup.
A standard desktop is super easy to add a new hard drive to.
I’m working on getting my own video online on how to do this, but in the meantime there
are thousands of other guides online on how to do this - a little Google can go a long
way.
;) Many laptops - especially ones under $500
- don’t have the option for a secondary hard drive slot.
If yours does, go right ahead and add it in - the screws are usually fairly-well labeled.
If not, then you need to look into other options.
On a desktop or laptop, if you have USB 3.0 ports on your computer, you can use a USB
3.0 external hard drive for recording.
I, personally, shy away from this recommendation because external hard drives used to be made
pretty cheaply and would burn out quicker than a laptop drive for recording - but nowadays
they’re pretty good.
You want a USB 3.0 one, however, as USB 2.0 drives often can’t sustain the required
data transfer rates required for recording quality footage.
And before you ask - no, don’t record to a flash drive or a SD card.
A fast enough, SDXC UHS card might work with a USB 3.0 card reader, but overall it won’t
be a pleasant experience.
And the flash chips in a flash drive will definitely die on you for recording.
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I hope this video has been helpful to you and finally answers some questions I’ve
received for a long time.
If you enjoyed it, smash the like button and get subscribed for more awesome tech videos.
My name’s EposVox and I’ll see you next time.