answered Poor scenery loading due to hard drive installation.

[NorCal.Pilot]

Hey forum,

 

I do most of my sim flying in California/west coast so I have all of the NorCal region and True Earth products. My operating system and main P3DV5.1 installation is on my SSD which has used up essentially all of the available space on it, so I use my larger capacity hard drive for scenery and addon installations. This has caused a "bottle neck" (for lack of a better term) when flying in the sim. When flying within the NorCal region or transitioning into the area, the scenery and mesh is really blurry and takes a few minutes to finally start loading in. 

 

I assume this is because the scenery is installed on a separate hard drive that is characteristically slower, causing the slow loading. If it were installed on the same SSD it would probably load faster (but I do not have available capacity). Is this assumption correct? Would it be a good move to buy another SSD (smaller capacity to accommodate just the west coast True Earth products)? Or would this only be mitigated by having the scenery installed on the same SSD as the sim?

 

Thanks for the help. 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

I don't believe that hard drive speed has any effect on FSX or P3D, except to lengthen the initial loading time.

In flight, none of the simulators demand a scenery loading rate that even approaches the limits of an HDD.

In all cases, the less work that the simulator has to do, the better it will be able to perform the tasks asked of it.

Locking the frame rate at 30 fps or so, flying a slower and less complex addon aircraft and only loading the scenery

over which the chosen flight will pass are three ways of lessening the load and therefore allowing the simulator more

resources to use to show you focused scenery.