[Halp] FRAPS/Hard Drive Space issue

Bethryn

So, earlier today I was recording a fair bit of game footage with FRAPS. Normally I have more than enough hard drive space for this, but on this particular occasion I let things run over and ran out of hard drive space, totally.

The game hung for a few seconds and then FRAPS stopped recording. I guess I was out of space, and checked my C: and sure enough, 0 bytes. So, I closed down FRAPS and the program I was running, and this is the weird bit.

13.5gb freed themselves up when I did this.

I'm just curious as to where these have come from. It's on a 200gb hard drive, so is it using the hard drive as slow memory (my PC isn't configured to)?

Occasionally I get weird FPS drops at times when I really shouldn't when recording, so I'm wondering whether the two are related.

Anyway, I'd appreciate anyone who knows, explaining why my gigabytes are being all eaten up in this manner, and whether 'fixing' it would be good or bad.

Roland_tHTG

Did fraps actually record everything while you were playing?

Ayulin

Did you press the record key, or press and hold it to start?

While I don't think this is the exact cause, the newest version of Fraps has a feature where it'll constantly record a 30 second loop if you press and hold the record key for one second (the FPS counter turns pink instead of red). If you press record again when this happens, it'll save those 30 seconds and start recording from that point on; kind of like the GTA IV clip editor.

I've experienced FPS drops as well, and they seem to come shortly after Fraps creates a new video file; the files it spits out are limited to about 4GB in size. On my system, the drops correspond with hard disk activity and happen about 30 seconds into a subsequent video after the first 4GB segment.

Bethryn

FRAPS did indeed record everything I did; when I ran out of space the latest file was inaccessible to view even after closing the game and FRAPS; it was constantly 'in use', even after restart. O_o

Ayulin, the whole "just after it makes a new file" is actually fairly consistent with my experience now I think about it. However, if I stop recording and start again, it doesn't fix itself; indeed, generally, nothing short of a restart fixes it.

Other than that, I always press F9 once so it keeps recording for more than 30 seconds; no holding down.

SmokeStacks

You should really be recording to a different hard drive than the one you are playing your game from. Since you said it was your C:\ drive I am assuming (barring unusual naming conventions on your system) that it's either your main or only hard drive. Recording to a different drive will get you a mild to humongous performance increase depending on your hardware since you won't be reading from and writing to your hard drive at the same time.

Not only that, but if you manage to fill up the drive you won't cause lockups when Windows can't write data to the drive anymore.

Also, a 200GB drive is way too small to record and store any significant amount of gameplay. If you plan on doing a lot of recording, you should definitely look into picking up another hard drive (two hundred gigs is a little low in general, let alone for recording uncompressed video). They're not very expensive, you can snag a 160GB drive for like $40 (or go balls out and get a 1TB drive for around $80) on newegg.

That's weird about the ~13GB that showed up when you quit Fraps though. As far as I know it doesn't reserve space while it's running.