Anyone here a seasoned FRAPS user?

I'm thinking about buying it when WOTLK comes out and I start playing WoW again.

My big question is how much does having a good hard-drive help your in game performance while frapsing? I've tried the demo version and my FPS didn't really go down that much, but there was significant lag while playing.

Or do you pretty much just have to deal with bad performance while frapsing?

Doesn't really matter, the thing that really matters is your cpu, ive been using it on a Pentium 930 for pretty much every game that has come out in the last 2 years. You'll have no problem using it, I use it to record on my sata2 drive and there is no lagging or studdderin. So usually there is no performance loss, other than it having to render the frames via your video card.

The thing that helps the most in my experience is recording your FRAPS video to a different hard drive than the one you are playing the game from. A multi-core CPU also helps quite a bit. Also, make sure you set the FPS at which you record to something you find playable because FRAPS will lock your FPS at that value when you are recording. So if you leave it at the default of 30 FPS you will get 30 FPS when playing while recording.