Question about streaming and multiple hard drives.

[Kevnvek]

I'll probably shoot this question at Dat later on when he gets on Steam, but I figured I may as well post it up here too for now.

So I have a spare 30GB Solid State Drive I'm not really using for anything setup as a secondary drive in my computer (I initially had my OS installed on it but found it to be too much of a hassle with such limited space and reformatted to my other HDD). I've been streaming lately and am noticing a fairly frequent, temporary dip in framerate that I still haven't found the source of, but could possibly be my hard drive (I have a 1TB HDD set as the C drive). I've been monitoring my six core CPU and it doesn't go beyond about 70% total/per core when it happens. Also my GPU usage dips during the drop according to MSI Afterburner. I didn't usually have the issue with XSplit, but I stopped using it since they want to charge annual fees. Now I'm trying Flash Media Encoder, so it handles streaming slightly differently, which could lead to different problems.

My question is, if I installed all of my streaming software, Dxtory (the FRAPS like capture program that I have set as the camera for FME) and FME, to my secondary 30GB SSD, would the read/write of the actual streaming process be handled by it, and be separate from the read/write happening as I play my game on the main HDD? Would I be able to benefit from this, or would it lead to other complications like limitations from transfer speeds?

Another possible reason for the performance issue could be low hard disk space. I had about 100 of my 900GB free thanks to Steam. Right now I'm in the middle of compacting my whole C drive though, so I now have a bit over 200GB free so far.

[eminutia]

Umm..what? Heh, as far as I know, secondary drives are much slower and cannot comply quite well with your master HD. Running a program that uses both HD's might cause problems, but they're on your computer and if you have diagnostic software installed you shouldn't encounter anything substantially devastating. It would notify you of that, right? And having a lot of free space on your hard drive is good, not really sure how good, I think performance is more based on memory than free space.

I think all people who stream initially have frame rate issues, maybe your system is better suited for other kinds of software. Just a thought.

[Dateranoth]

If you are just streaming and not capturing anything to the hard drive then it should have very little effect on the performance. If the game is clipping then it could be the hard drive. You can install the solid state drive and use a secondary drive, but I doubt it will help the problem. The SSD is best used as the OS drive and then installing everything else on the secondary larger drive. Almost everything offers the option of an install path. If by compressing you mean windows compression then don't do it. You will be creating more of a performance bottle neck then helping. Having too little space on a hard drive can cause performance issues, but only when it gets way low. Like 3x your total RAM low. However, as you fill it up the data on the inner portions of the platter will be slower to access, but how slow is hard to determine. The most important issue is making sure your hard drive stays defragmented. If there is a lot of fragmentation then you can see hick ups in access and large seek times which slows everything down.

Is the issue happening in every game or just a certain one? Is it only happening when you're live or does it do it when you capture directly to your HDD? And, again, are you talking both in game and stream or just in stream?