Hello everyone...

My question is in the title. I am planning to build a PC come next year, hopefully with the latest hardware then, and I want to dedicate an entire hard disk drive to X-Plane scenery. I was wondering roughly how much capacity I'd need to cover more or less most of Europe and North America with ZL16 orthophoto scenery, with higher-detail scenery around airports. Is 4 TB sufficient, with some breathing room for mesh scenery as well? My current X-Plane 10 install is roughly 300 GB, which includes HD Mesh Scenery v3 and the default global scenery minus the areas covered by HDv3. I don't have any orthophotos yet.

Not sure... I can tell you I've done most of the socal area and then some... these tiles are ZL16 only and the size is 40GB total.

There are around 1000 tiles for US alone.. so for US , you should be good with 2.5 tb for ZL 16

Have the UK/ NL/BE/DE/CH/AT/DK and Mallorca in ZL16 with several airports with zones 18 and 19 defined and at a total SSD size of  310 GB...

Thinking of expanding with 1 tb SSD which should cover ES/FR/IT/GR...

 

You can cover the entire USA, including Hawaii and Alaska with ZL16 and ZL19 at major airports with a 4TB drive.   You will need a second drive if you want Europe also.

 

Be prepared for one annoying thing XP11 does very poorly when you have a ton of Ortho loaded.    I have the entire USA loaded all at once as I don't feel like picking and choosing my states.  I have 32gigs of RAM and 11gigs of VRAM on a 1080ti card.   Despite this...  XP11 will dump on you into the single digit FPS realm when it goes to dump out the memory core and refill it with all new scenery as you progress in your flight.    Depending on the speed of your system and harddrives this Load Lag can take about 10-15 seconds to finish.     I generally get about 45-60 minutes of flight time in before XP11 does a memory dump to load the more scenery.     With Uncompressed textures on it is even worse.    I saw the total RAM in use get as high as 16gigs!   That was a stuff video card and RAM.     With texture compression set to MAX instead its not nearly as demanding and you can go further before the memory dump is enforced.

 

I wish XP11 was a little more subtle in its releasing and gathering of memory.    That ALL or NOTHING thing it does is rather annoying.   Prepar3D is superior at loading and unloading memory.  I never see that sim skip a heartbeat when flying with high levels of RAM.   Of course, I never see X-Plane 11 ever run out of memory though.  =)    I guess we have to pick which battles to fight and lose the others.

Yes this is one thing I noticed... And not all tiles give you the same performance.. Flying in San Jose with Ortho level 17 can get your fps in single digits at times....I was all in the process of downloading entire US. And I figured it did not give me consistent performance. So I am only doing selective tiles..I have 4770k 4.3ghz,32 GB RAM and Nvidia 980ti 6gb...