HDD lock up under heavy load - capturing game footage

kkbigal · 17 Sep 2012 at 13:23

I've been experimenting with a range of programs to capture game footage (Dxtory/MSI Afterburner) and I keep running into HDD lock ups when capturing footage.

Games are hosted on a SanDisk SSD and I'm capturing video to an admittedly old WD Caviar 2500KS 250gb HDD (7200rpm) - circa 2005 judging by what Google has to say.

The HDD can manage about 45-50mb/s sequential write speed and it records footage at 1080p at 30fps fine for a minutes, but will suddenly lock up with the HDD activity LED stuck on solid and the game will hang. After 20 - 30 seconds, the game unfreezes and the drive comes back to life.

I've tried changing footage quality to 720p/20fps and the same thing happens.

Just wondering if I'm asking too much from this drive and, if so, what modern drive would you recommend to replace it? I'd be looking at something 2 - 3TB in size, any advice is welcome

sadbuttrue · 17 Sep 2012 at 13:51

Have you done a complete drive scan? It may be capable of 50mb/s at the beginning of the drive, but once full up and approaching the end you may be down to 10-20mb/s.

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

Judging by the age I would expect it to have issues such as bad sectors tho.

I use MHDD myself, but use at your own risk. For safety reasons I'd disconnect any other drives first

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

Any modern large drive will give you 70-120mb/s.

kkbigal · 17 Sep 2012 at 16:32

Thanks for that

I did a complete chkdsk yesterday and it didn't find any bad sectors, but it took an absolute age to complete; it may well have frozen during the check as it was stuck on 3% completed on the file integrity check for a very long time.

The drive has about 200gb free and the freezing happens after writing as little as 2.5gb, so it's not particularly full when the problem occurs.

I'll take a look at the tools you linked when I get home

kkbigal · 17 Sep 2012 at 22:41

Formatted the drive and then ran the HD Tune app and got exactly the same problem:

You can see the 2 points on the graph where the drive locks up - this pause is probably about 30 seconds in both cases. Don't think there's much I can do with it.

sadbuttrue · 17 Sep 2012 at 22:48

If the drive isn't dead, 56c will soon get it there

kkbigal · 17 Sep 2012 at 23:17

sadbuttrue said:
If the drive isn't dead, 56c will soon get it there

Well I just opened my case up and found (to my horror) that only one of the front fans was working. I'd forgotten to plug the top fan in, which cools the SSD/HDD bays when I built the rig

It's shaved 6 degrees off the HDD. Unfortunately, it's still exhibiting the same problem, but at least I'm running with all fans now.

kkbigal · 20 Sep 2012 at 18:05

Replaced the drive with a new Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 3TB drive.

24 degrees and read/write speeds over twice of the previous drive