I just installed an additional 1TB M.2 drive yesterday. 😁

I wonder if we really need an M.2 for the scenery precaching.

If we do not precache, the scenery is streamed and that is supposed to work fine, at least with a decent connection / bandwidth. And even the best streaming bandwidth is still a lot slower than the reading speed of an HDD. So why do we need a faster drive for the precaching?

Anybody with more knowledge please explain what I am missing here.

16 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

I wonder if we really need an M.2 for the scenery precaching.

If we do not precache, the scenery is streamed and that is supposed to work fine, at least with a decent connection / bandwidth. And even the best streaming bandwidth is still a lot slower than the reading speed of an HDD. So why do we need a faster drive for the precaching?

Anybody with more knowledge please explain what I am missing here.

It's very likely overkill and will get me nothing extra in performance. I simply like them because I am obsessive about cable management (the only cables you can see are the two GPU 8-pins and 24-pin, which are custom combed cables with a very short run around the back), and I don't like seeing SATA cables.

Edited July 14, 20205 yr by Hyperfocal

31 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

I wonder if we really need an M.2 for the scenery precaching.

If we do not precache, the scenery is streamed and that is supposed to work fine, at least with a decent connection / bandwidth. And even the best streaming bandwidth is still a lot slower than the reading speed of an HDD. So why do we need a faster drive for the precaching?

Anybody with more knowledge please explain what I am missing here.

For the intial precaching that´s right I think. However I would assume once it is downloaded, you might benefit on your next flight if it is loaded directly from an SSD instead of an HDD or via Cloud. I might be wrong with this, but we will see. 

If the streaming works fine and reliable I think I will reserve maybe 200 GB for the areas I frequently visit.  But I might also throw in another 4 TB Hard disk just for streaming/caching scenary. It does not cost THAT much and I still have some room left in my rig...

 

 

Edited July 14, 20205 yr by Heavy Metal

9 minutes ago, Heavy Metal said:

For the intial precaching that´s right I think. However I would assume once it is downloaded, you might benefit on your next flight if it is loaded directly from an SSD instead of an HDD or via Cloud. I might be wrong with this, but we will see. 

If the streaming works fine and reliable I think I will reserve maybe 200 GB for the areas I frequently visit.  But I might also throw in another 4 TB Hard disk just for streaming/caching scenary. It does not cost THAT much and I still have some room left in my rig...

 

 

Would be good to know more about this before deciding to get a 1 TB M.2 or a 10 TB HDD for roughly the same price.

On 7/13/2020 at 1:10 PM, Jeff 83 said:

Just bought a Samsung 970 Pro m.2 drive just for MSFS.

Have it...and love it.

Stan

10 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

Would be good to know more about this before deciding to get a 1 TB M.2 or a 10 TB HDD for roughly the same price.

Fully agreed. But you make it sound as if you need the decision right now because there might not be any HDD or SSD left in late August or September... 🙂 

It is just a few more weeks and we will all know by then what it takes to stream scenary in the desired quality without precaching. And we will know if a HDD is fast enough to stream precached scenary in its highest quality or if it might cause some kind of stuttering or blurries. We should also know by then if you can adjust the streaming quality manually or even separately from precaching - I hope so, as I would not need ZL18 quality when flying airliners, but would love to have best quality when flying slow and low - but at the moment it´still too much speculation on this. 

Personally  I would guess that today´s SATA HDD should be more than sufficient in theory and would rather have more storage then less. However I cannot deny that f.e. P3D scenary is streaming better on a SSD than HDD even if data is conseriably less. But you probably can´t compare this against each other.

So, let´s wait until 18 August and then we will still know what we are at before deciding what to buy.

3 minutes ago, Heavy Metal said:

Fully agreed. But you make it sound as if you need the decision right now because there might not be any HDD or SSD left in late August or September... 🙂 

That wasn't my intention. I am in no rush.😉

I had an empty 500gb SSD that I had completely forgotten about. Luckily, I remembered that it was unused and available just in time to appropriate it as the base drive for my current happily installed Alpha of the sim.

Edited July 14, 20205 yr by HiFlyer

I'll be ordering a 4 or 6TB drive just for MSFS. Sims get their own drives on my PC. X-Plane 11 for example is on its own drive.

Wonder how much data it would be to cache the entire state of Florida or Illinois or England for that matter.

7 hours ago, IAhawkeyeDDS said:

Wonder how much data it would be to cache the entire state of Florida or Illinois or England for that matter.

An excellent question as the cache mode has never been tested as far as we know.

The download could only cover a route, lets say Miami to Tampa or London to Paris etc with 50  nm on each side on orthos which would be less than 20k nm^2.