Dropping frames capturing uncompressed 384x224 @ 60fps, need HDD reco

[NoAffinity]

I'm doing some uncompressed .avi capturing, with an arcade emulator. The AVI recording is a function of the emulator, so everything is happening withing software/my PC. The game is 384x224 @ 60fps. My system is pretty beefy (AMD 64 X2 3800+, 1 GB DDR PC-4200, Nvidia 7600GT), and does not appear to be bogging down in the least (10% CPU useage and around 350MB RAM useage, when capturing), but I am dropping frames. I am capturing to a Western Digital SATA 2.0 (3.0 Gb/s) 7200 RPM hard drive, connected to a SATA 2.0 connector on the motherboard, with plenty of room on it.

Firstly, would this seem to be a fast enough drive to capture to?

If not, would a 10k Raptor be sufficient....or any other suggestions?

[Soopafresh]

Capturing to a separate physical drive might help. Have to write "might" because it's always a cr@pshoot without looking at the system. Depending on the size of the arcade game, you can also try creating a RAM drive and running the app from there, while capturing to the physical drive. That would segregate reads from writes.

Also, you can run NTfilemon from sysinternals and look for any apps which might be doing file/disk i/o. Kill thoses processes before capturing. Google for FSautostart to temporarily halt apps and services before you capture. Finally, download Jkdefrag to perform a fast drive defrag.

[Scorpion King]

Your drive is plenty fast enough, that is not the problem.

10%cpu usage on uncompressed is a tad high. My little 3.0G P4 captures your 384x224 uncompressed with PCM 16bit stereo bouncing between 1%-4% cpu but at 29.97fps. I wasn't doing anything else at the time but capturing the video with my ATI AIW card, so your 10% isn't that bad with other running operations. That isn't enough load to worry about dropping frames.

My guess would be a dominant running application like anti-virus, windows restore, etc, or maybe a sound card or sound card driver issue. Any of these can do it - I'm living proof.

Good luck.

[gadgetguy]

Does it drop frames continuously or in spurts? If in spurts, try watching the processes in task manager (sort by CPU). See if anything jumps to the top of the list when frames are dropped.

[NoAffinity]

Wow, thanks for all the quick and informative feedback, guys. I forgot to mention that the drive I am capturing to is a secondary physical drive in the system. The .avi capturing utility of the emulator does not have a monitoring function, so I don't know exactly when frames are dropping. Comparing the frames of my .avi capture to existing frame data, there are missing frames and it seems somewhat sporadic. I.E. say a certain move within the game has 20 total frames, consisting of 5 different animation frames. Well, I may get 18 total frames on three different executions of the move, but the duration of the different animation frames will vary from one instance to the next.

Well, good to know it's not the hard drive. I will try the suggestions herein, and report back if I gain success.