Has anyone loaded MSFS onto it's own dedicated drive? 

Is there much benefit or do files get loaded all over the PC anyway?

Just thinking of protecting space my my main drive. My second is for photos, movies etc so don't want to use that.

What size would work? Do you need a full 1TB or would 500GB be enough for sometime? I

I do. Had already a dedicated HDD for FSX and now a Samsung 860 for MSFS. Is it faster? For sure. I have both the programm/launcher installed on that drive and the content /official and /community. No idea of whether that makes sense of if it would be better to have the launcher on my Win10 c:/ Drive though. My SSD size is 500GB and it’s getting pretty full already with the world updates and some 3PD scenery. 

Edited February 21, 20215 yr by DAD

Yup. I did that with a 500Gb drive. I'd say it was worth doing.

Yes I've got a 500GB Flight Sim drive. Its also a Samsung 860 actually.

It has MSFS and P3D on it, the latter doesn't really get used though.

Windows also has its own 250GB SSD, which also has other small but commonly used applications like browsers and Office.

Steam and the few Steam games I have are just installed on my 2TB Hard drive along with all my data.

 

Assuming sufficient space, just put the simulator in your fastest drive. With modern SSDs there isn't really any benefit to keeping games on a separate one, you just have to make sure they don't get full. So if your OS drive has enough free space to accommodate the simulator and any add-ons you might want, that's where it goes.

How full an SSD can get before it starts losing performance depends on the strength of the controller, presence of DRAM cache, SLC cache method (static is better) and to a smaller extent the quality of the flash. For cheaper SSDs, you generally shouldn't let more than 70% of the drive fill up, but stronger models can take up to 90%.

It's good to know !
I just bought a Samsung EVO 970 SSD

With the translator if I understand correctly, no need to have 2 SSDs?
Just one is enough with the OS and MFS2020 installed on it?
If that's it it's cool because I wanted to buy another one to put the OS on 😀

9 minutes ago, Axis3600 said:

It's good to know !
I just bought a Samsung EVO 970 SSD

With the translator if I understand correctly, no need to have 2 SSDs?
Just one is enough with the OS and MFS2020 installed on it?
If that's it it's cool because I wanted to buy another one to put the OS on 😀

The 970 Evo is an extremely performant SSD, pretty much top of the line if you exclude the newer PCIe 4.0 drives which are still very expensive and not necessary yet. So yes, if your drive has at least 500GB, putting both the OS and the simulator in there is the best option.

I originally installed MSFS on a dedicated 250 gb SSD but bought a 1 tb m.2 SSD and cloned the old drive onto it.

I had to repair MSFS from the store afterwards, but that only took a few minutes and it is all working fine.

Other than having more space now, I haven't noticed any difference in the way the sim loads or runs, but it's hard to tell due to the varying numbers of addons ive had in the community folder and the effects of world update 3.

Keeping the community folder light has a massive impact on loading times though and I'm now running without any caches at the moment, having cleared them priir to the update.

2 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

The 970 Evo is an extremely performant SSD, pretty much top of the line if you exclude the newer PCIe 4.0 drives which are still very expensive and not necessary yet. So yes, if your drive has at least 500GB, putting both the OS and the simulator in there is the best option.

thanks for the advice

It's good to know

They are cheap enough now that its' worth doing your loading time will be like 20x faster and you will get a smoother flight since the sim is not blocked on IO as much waiting for assets to load.