I currently have 2 drives: one HDD for other programs and stuff, and I have a SATA SSD as my boot drive and the drive I have FSX:SE and P3D v4 on. I only have 37GB (might seem like a perfectly fine amount but not to me) left on the SSD so I am taking a look at getting an M.2 SSD to expand with because I really want to get X-Plane 11 with the FlyJSim 727. I want to get rid of FSX:SE completely and even though it would free up space, it is still not enough to comfortably accommodate X-Plane 11.  But my real question is, based on a demo test of X-Plane 11, I can confirm it seems to perform slightly better IMO than P3D v4. So based on this, I was thinking since P3D seems to have a harder time with a few things, I would stick it onto the M.2 SSD and then X-plane 11 onto my boot drive, that way I could get the most out of both sims for my system. But I'm not sure this is exactly how I should be thinking of M.2 SSDs as. Right now, all I know is they are faster and more reliable, put two and two together, fast drive = fast sim. I just need to know if this would be a setup that gets the best out of both sims. Thanks

I researched this for my new build and opted for a small (256 Gb) M.2 for the OS, and a big (2Tb) SSD for the sims. My understanding is that the M.2 will help P3D boot and load times, but not performance - the program can't handle data at the rate the M.2 drive is feeding it through. I didn't research X-Plane and I'll defer to X-Plane users, but I suspect the story would be simililar. An M.2 might give you future-proofing, and it's certainly the fastest thing out there, but I didn't want to pay the premium for a big drive. There have been some good discussions here about them. Search on "M.2" and see what you come up with. Hope this helps.