I was thinking about doing the same thing with ent_preload. I would load resources associated with the sectors around the player before approaching them. I would then use ent_purge when the data was in a sector that is not adjacent to the player's sector.

This should work fine, but I am not sure about using ent_preload. If it works the way I am thinking it does, it will load the model data all in one frame, this would cause a jerk if it tries to load too much data. Also, it has to read the data from the hard drive which is known to have a delay while it seeks where the data is. There is a possibility to stagger the ent_preloads to try and minimize the jerks, and if the data is relatively close to each other on the hard drive there may not be much of a jerk.

If ent_preload were to load the data over multiple frames then there would be no jerking. This would be called streaming, and I do not think that A7 supports streaming.