Has anyone cached all 2PB yet? How long would that take 😉

Building a 1 TB rolling cache on M.2 NVME raid array the whole process of creating 1TB encrypted virtual drive was just as long as it was to download and install the application,

 I wonder what’s the overhead involved in accessing that encrypted drive data over a non-encrypted drive in this scenario, 

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by iCann

5 hours ago, spacesimmer said:

Think of it like this. Everytime you fly over a new area, or a new city for instance, the streaming data will be also be saved into the cache. Anytime you fly over that area again, the rolling cache will load the scenery for that area from the cache instead of having to stream it again.

If you were to ever fly back to those areas you have already flown before, and your rolling cache was large enough, in theory you could stream an area only once and never have to stream it again. You'd be saving lots of unnecessary bandwidth usage.

With it only costing hard drive space, I'd say it's a pretty useful feature.

Well in my case bandwidth is free (no cap), while HDD/SSD space costs money. So having a giant cache taking up precious SSD space would only make sense if there was a noticeable benefit.

I don't see any benefit in the rolling cache and disabled it. Never had any streaming issues. Footprint of the sim stays at 100GB.

9 hours ago, dobee51 said:

The worst part of the rolling cache is you can't recover that disk space. MSFS 2020 won't let you reduce the size. I wanted to reduce my rolling cache from 250 down to 50, and it told me I didn't have enough space left on the drive.

You have to turn it off in game first then you can delete it.  The go back in and add the new size you want.

3 hours ago, Colonel X said:

I don't see any benefit in the rolling cache and disabled it. Never had any streaming issues. Footprint of the sim stays at 100GB.

I agree. Firstly, caching scenery to your disc, whether rolling or manual, will require hard disc activity. That implies CPU cycles. That implies additional strain and maybe that explains why switching this off is improving performance for some. Beyond that is the issue of writing to your SSD. Rolling cache is continuously writing to your SSD as you fly. I have always been led to believe that SSD’s lifespan is determined by write cycles. I have both disabled. Fortunately I have a relatively decent internet connection though.

8 minutes ago, RaptyrOne said:

I agree. Firstly, caching scenery to your disc, whether rolling or manual, will require hard disc activity. That implies CPU cycles. That implies additional strain and maybe that explains why switching this off is improving performance for some. Beyond that is the issue of writing to your SSD. Rolling cache is continuously writing to your SSD as you fly. I have always been led to believe that SSD’s lifespan is determined by write cycles. I have both disabled. Fortunately I have a relatively decent internet connection though.

Yeah, I have seen the sim streaming with 100Mbps, when droning in large cities.

About the disc activity, I don't think it's even a thing - the sim downloads the data and writes it to the disk (as opposed to directly in ram), having a rolling cache only prevents that data from being deleted once you quit the session or "leave the area".

Manual Cache is unusable at the moment, especially when you start adding more and more regions it get's unbelievably slow to and unresponsive. 

If you have good internet speeds with plenty of downstream then it's better just to disable manual cache and for the time being, hopefully they will fix the awfully slow issues with it. I just use rolling cache now. I believe I read somewhere that rolling cache downloads the data as HIGH.

14 minutes ago, RaptyrOne said:

Beyond that is the issue of writing to your SSD. Rolling cache is continuously writing to your SSD as you fly. I have always been led to believe that SSD’s lifespan is determined by write cycles. I have both disabled. Fortunately I have a relatively decent internet connection though.

That is a very good point. I have no stutter issues and also a very good Internet connection (1 Gbps fiber). But my SSDs are oldish... might try to save them some work...

I believe 300Gb rolling caches and whatnot are excessive and don't help except waste/occupy hard drive space. My sim downloads around 1Gb of data after playing a few hours. (give or take) so the 8Gb cache can hold a week's worth of playing with visiting new areas each day before it starts deleting something. IMO the cache is meant to hold the areas you frequent often, and delete areas you haven't visited in a while.

If you want or need that much offline data, you're better off using the manual cache option and selecting onthe map which areas must always be available offline.

11 hours ago, spacesimmer said:

Think of it like this. Everytime you fly over a new area, or a new city for instance, the streaming data will be also be saved into the cache. Anytime you fly over that area again, the rolling cache will load the scenery for that area from the cache instead of having to stream it again.

If you were to ever fly back to those areas you have already flown before, and your rolling cache was large enough, in theory you could stream an area only once and never have to stream it again. You'd be saving lots of unnecessary bandwidth usage.

With it only costing hard drive space, I'd say it's a pretty useful feature.

Yes, I understand what this rolling cache is for, but for me, bandwidth is of no concern so personally I have no use for it.

The purpose of the rolling cache and manual cache is not to improve performance (unless as other's have said, your connectivity is complete garbage), it's to limit repeated bandwidth usage, and that is helpful for some folks with data caps.

Let's work with some smaller caps and see what we mean.  Let's say your default airport is SEATAC for argument sake. You have 5GB as a rolling cache and no manual cache.

You takeoff at SEATAC and the Seattle Tacoma area is cached according to how you fly.  If you are buzzing Mt. Rainer at "low altitude" then Mount Rainier will render in highest available detail.  If you Buzz Mount St. Helens, as well, that stuff also will cache according to how low you fly.  Let's say you then decide to fly down the Columbia River Gorge at treetop level.  Point is, at some point of time, all that cache that was created for SEATAC will expire.  It will be "rolled out". 

How fast it "rolls out" will depend primarily on your LOD sliders.  If your LOD sliders are set high, then you will download larger areas of detailed imagery around your plane. .  Lower LOD settings will limit the amount of detailed imagery closer to your plane.  

Eventually when you fly into SEATAC again, you'll have to redownload it.  Now if you have good bandwidth and no datacap.  No problem.  But if you do have data caps, now you are unnecessarily re-downloading a place that you frequent.  Waste of bandwidth.

By increasing the rolling cache, you lengthen the time it takes for your cached data to expire, thus limiting how many times you have to redownload.  But that has it's own problems as we'll see later.

If you do a LOT of flying in and out of a specific region.  Then it makes sense to create a manual cache of that area, so that it never expires and never has to redownload.  So if you routinely Buzz downtown Seattle, then set the region around Seattle as high, it will automatically extend medium and low areas, and then that's a piece you never have to download again.  I set all my frequented airports as high detailed cached areas so that I don't have to re-download them.  I have no data caps now, but my internet provider can always change their mind.  

Now here's the downside to cache, and a reason to NOT have huge caches.

All of this great looking scenery "data" is normally kept on azure servers in the cloud.  So if Bing maps updates an area with new satellite data, they'll post it to the cloud, just like Google Maps does.  If you have a huge cache, you'll never get the updated imagery until after your cache for that area rolls out.  And if you manual cache a data, that area is "frozen in time" forever..  So to keep your cached areas updated, it's a good idea to clear and recreate them periodically so you can get any corrections Bing may have made.  (i.e. that road that used to be under construction but is now finished,)

I have a 50GB rolling cache and a 10GB static cache that I primarily use for Airports that I fly in and out of regularly.  They are "small enough" to delete and recreate periodically so that I can keep my scenery updated with the latest updates.

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by wthomas33065
Added statement about LOD sliders.

6 hours ago, dpcnh1 said:

You have to turn it off in game first then you can delete it.  The go back in and add the new size you want.

That makes sense, ok.

5 hours ago, RaptyrOne said:

I have always been led to believe that SSD’s lifespan is determined by write cycles.

Just because this pops up a lot, I want to point something out here:

It is true that flash memory only lasts for a limited number of write cycles.   But with current drives the effect of this on drive life for consumer purposes is often highly overstated by folks who mean well but don't truly know or understand the numbers in use.  The simple fact is that under normal usage patterns a 1TB SSD's theoretical write cycle lifespan can outlast the expected useful life of the drive by many, many years.   There's a lot of writing you can read on this if you want to look for it.  Here's one quick page on it.     The more notable issue with SSDs is that they fail differently from HDDs.    You don't get the gradual creep of bad sectors that you often do with a hard drive at the end of its useful lifespan -- instead you get sudden mass failure as a whole bank of memory dies.   But this is of minimal concern if you have rational backup policies, which you should have anyway if you care about data security.

The upshot for me is this:   I put every single thing I can on SSDs, except for cold(ish) storage of large amounts of data.  And I have a regular backup routine that includes nightly backups both to a NAS on my network and to off-site cloud storage.   I sleep well at night knowing that my most commonly accessed data will be rapidly available and even if a drive fails I can recover from it easily.

 

Don't worry about the life of your SSDs.  Use them and be happy.   And back your stuff up, regardless of what you do.

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by kaosfere

5 hours ago, cantremember said:

I believe 300Gb rolling caches and whatnot are excessive and don't help except waste/occupy hard drive space. My sim downloads around 1Gb of data after playing a few hours. (give or take) so the 8Gb cache can hold a week's worth of playing with visiting new areas each day before it starts deleting something. IMO the cache is meant to hold the areas you frequent often, and delete areas you haven't visited in a while.

If you want or need that much offline data, you're better off using the manual cache option and selecting onthe map which areas must always be available offline.

See I have a 30gb rolling cache and mainly fly around Denver but each time it has to re-download it from scratch. 😕

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by UAL4life