Is there a benefit to recording high-quality gameplay to a different Gen4 M.2 SSD from the one I have my OS and game on?

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KALK4L
Posts: 30
Joined: 08 Jan 2022, 09:26
Location: Asia

Is there a benefit to recording high-quality gameplay to a different Gen4 M.2 SSD from the one I have my OS and game on?

Post by KALK4L » 05 Jun 2023, 06:22

Assuming top of the line Gen4 M.2 SSD like the WD SN850X is used, do you get any benefit while recording high quality gameplay using OBS to a separate M.2 SSD from the one I have my OS and game on? Could this lead to a better FPS with less stuttering while recording?

I couldn't find any tests online about this unfortunately.

GammaLyrae
Posts: 116
Joined: 28 Mar 2018, 01:44

Re: Is there a benefit to recording high-quality gameplay to a different Gen4 M.2 SSD from the one I have my OS and game

Post by GammaLyrae » 05 Jun 2023, 15:21

Depends on the game and the context

Even the fastest drives have much lower performance when being tasked with doing random reads and writes, or combinations of tasks like sequential writes and reads, whether those reads are random or sequential. If at any point in your game it needs to retrieve data from the drive in order to render the next frame in time (in time in this case being "to prevent stutter"), and the drive is already busy with a high bandwidth sequential write, the odds of that data being read in time go down.

A bottleneck can still be formed with the use of two separate drives, for example if they share pci-e lanes to the processor, but this is much less likely to be a problem

The situations in which this can be a problem are difficult to repeat and benchmark for

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