Solving A Hard Drive Dilemma For MegaSceneryEarth and FSX Users…

Solving The MegaSceneryEarth Storage Space vs Storage Cost vs Performance Dilemma To Achieve High Quality Display Of High Quality Scenery

Everything that’s great comes at a price and MegaSceneryEarth is no exception in terms of the size of the data set that is required for such large areas of 1 meter per pixel photoscenery.

At an average size of around 40 Gb per scenery area it doesn’t take you purchasing too many titles before the space that MegaSceneryEarth occupies on your hard drive becomes substantial.

Many users of flight simulation products are investing in Solid State Drives (SSD) for the performance benefits they offer. MegaSceneryEarth performs really well when stored on SSDs due to the increased performance that SSDs offer. The only drawback is the cost per gigabyte of SSDs as well as the number of drives able to be installed on a typical desktop case.

As a result of the high cost of SSDs and the relative limited amount of data able to be installed in a typical system, most flight sim users and MegaSceneryEarth users continue to use physical rotating platter hard drives. The low cost of such drives and the massive amounts of data able to be hosted on a typical desktop PC means that they are going to be around for a long time to come. They are also going to always be at around a 10 to 1 price advantage over SSDs in terms of cost per Gigabyte and their performance does continue to improve.

One of the «tricks» that some brands and models of traditional rotating platter hard drives implement is that of an SSD cache built into the drive. A few Gb of SSD flash memory are built into the drive and is used to store recently accessed data. Next time the operating system requests that data, the data is read from the SSD equivalent instead of the physical hard drive. This can greatly increase performance but the limitation is that only a small amount of data can be cached because it usually is just a few Gb of hard drive data that can be cached. This isn’t very effective when using large data sets such as MegaSceneryEarth.

What about a software solution?

So the concept of using SSD storage to cache hard drive data (SSD Caching) is a proven one as indicated by the existence of Hybrid Drives. Intel also produces a driver that enables SSD caching however it is not available for all chipsets and does require certain more complicated hardware configurations such as setting up a RAID configuration.

What the average user wants is a simple software solution that at most would require the user to install an SSD or even easier, to just plug in a USB 3 flash drive.

There is a software solution that does just that. i.e. Enables you to use any available solid state storage device you may have and use to to cache your hard drive data. That software product is calledPrimoCache and it is available through our PC Aviator web store.

PrimoCache enables you to use an SSD or a partitioned portion of an SSD or even just a simple USB flash drive as SSD cache for a traditional hard drive. As a MegaSceneryEarth user who needs a certain level of performance to ensure that your FSX is waiting minimally for data it needs from the hard drive to display MegaSceneryEarth at its clearest and crispest, you can enjoy the option of having a large amount of your MegaSceneryEarth data affordably cached to an SSD or flash drive as, and only as, you use it. It’s a good way to keep all of your scenery installed on a larger lower price per Gb drive yet at the same time get the performance you need as scenery is cached to your SSD on the fly.

Why it becomes affordable is that a high performance SSD is only around $100 to $120 and the PrimoCache software is only $29.95. So for around $130 to $150 you still get to enjoy your large 2 Tb to 4 Tb drive that stores all of your scenery and other data and then have the most frequently used scenery conveniently and seamlessly cached to your SSD.

PrimoCache is pretty simple to set up and once you do set it up you can forget about it. It is very stable and very effective. We have been using this product on our FSX setups and all of our office PCs for around 1 year and it has proven to be very stable and our data has been safe.

So if you are looking for a solution that lets you have the best of both worlds, large low priced storage and at the same time fast SSD performance, then PrimoCache is a product we thoroughly recommend to our MegaSceneryEarth customers.

To find out more, please VISIT THIS PAGE at our sister store (pcaviator.com/store). There is detailed information on how PrimoCache works and the option to order it, along with the option of a high performance, low priced SSD drive. If you have a spare USB3 Flash drive handy then you can use that and be using PrimoCache in just a few minutes.

I’ve always been playing with such utilities over the years expressly for the purpose of helping my MegaSceneryEarth customers get better performance out of their scenery and this is the only product I have come across that I would confidently call a holy grail for increasing hard drive performance, or more specifically eliminating/minimizing the hard drive bottleneck.