MSFS Installation on a seperate SSD?

[CallsignDE 37]

I'm about to reinstall MSFS due to some hardware changes.
I've also got a new 1 tb M.2 SSD.

Is it fine to install both, windows and MSFS on the same SSD or should i better keep the actual one and seperate the installation of MSFS on that SSD? (like P3D or FSX)

Thanks for any advices!

 

Edited September 23, 2021 by CallsignDE

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

13 minutes ago, CallsignDE said:

Is it fine to install both, windows and MSFS on the same SSD or should i better keep the actual one and seperate the installation of MSFS on that SSD? (like P3D or FSX)

Performance wise you are not going to see a difference, but personally, I like to have MSFS on its own drive, just for good housekeeping.. The C drive tends to get cluttered with "other stuff"..

[ThrottleUp 618]

I second giving MSFS its own dedicated drive. Much easier to manage and keeps things tidy. My advice would be to put nothing else on that SSD - only MSFS. 

 

[sidfadc 1,344]

My hard drive has just crashed, no backup had to buy a new SSD.  Good news is flight sim and everything else on my other drive so didn’t lose days of downloads and reconfiguring.  Was up and running in a matter for hours.  So yea keep the C drive purely for your OS and stick everything else on another drive.

[turbomax 3,286]

30 minutes ago, sidfadc said:

So yea keep the C drive purely for your OS and stick everything else on another drive

sic! it has been best practice like this for the last 20-30 years.

[Republic3D 1,232]

I have a seperate M.2 SSD for MSFS and flight sim related software, and another regular SSD for the mods and addons. Works great.

[Twenty6 693]

I have Win10 and MSFS on the same SSD but on different partitions. There are no moving parts on an SSD so I don't understand the reason to put the OS and flight sim on completely different physical SSDs.

My two cwnts.

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

3 minutes ago, Twenty6 said:

There are no moving parts on an SSD so I don't understand the reason to put the OS and flight sim on completely different physical SSDs.

There is no "performance" reason... just good housekeeping as mentioned above.

[Brandon01110 407]

8 hours ago, sidfadc said:

My hard drive has just crashed, no backup had to buy a new SSD.  Good news is flight sim and everything else on my other drive so didn’t lose days of downloads and reconfiguring.  Was up and running in a matter for hours.  So yea keep the C drive purely for your OS and stick everything else on another drive.

and have a separate large spinning drive to back up all that you care for.  extra credit for also having an offsite backup location

[jmdriskell 178]

Yep to the above.   Two drives is a good rule, except I'm running out of room on my FSX drive (1/4 Tbyte).  I'm going to install a 1 TByte SSD in its place.   I also find a cloud backup system like "Backblaze" offers great comfort when things go south. 

[GEKtheReaper 364]

13 hours ago, CallsignDE said:

Is it fine to install both, windows and MSFS on the same SSD or should i better keep the actual one and seperate the installation of MSFS on that SSD? (like P3D or FSX)

I would advise to leave the OS on it's own drive and to install everything else on other drives.

E.g: Personaly I have a small SSD of only 256Gb which has my booting OS. I install on that drive everything that I need for daily use (Office, AV, so basically things related to the OS). This has never filled that drive more then 50%!

Other applications (e.g. Gimp) or games (even documents, music, Fotos, etc)  will go on other drives.

In my P3D times I also splitted P3D Apps themselves on 2 separate drives: 1 drive with the P3D installation AND everything that would change the sim on the fly (Shaders mods, Active Sky etc), and another drive with Apps that change the sim only once or on demand (some Textures like World Wide Airports HD, or things from the ENV series, even Airports etc.)

[jcomm 5,939]

I always had left sims away from the OS in the many years of using PCs at home for flight sims, but this last rig came with a single 1 TB M.2 so, I had to install MFS in 😄

Apparently it is way easier to update. Before I usually had some quirks at update time which I never really understoodd.

I even used to set a 3rd partition for the swap file ! Eheheh sysadmin disease....

[swiesma 625]

Doesn’t matter where you install it as long as it’s any kind of SSD. 

I have never had a SSD die on me.
So I run MSFS on my PCIe 4.0 drive which is by far the fastest drive I have  

https://photos.app.goo.gl/xVWx1pVzPuMNa4kZ6

[JimBrown 596]

3 hours ago, swiesma said:

I have never had a SSD die on me.

I have.

Recently. It just up and died. Completely. PC could not see it at all (tried on two different PC's).

Always have a backup.

...jim

 

[cianpars 1,166]

I had 2 250gb ssd's.  W10 on one and msfs on it's own ssd.  I bought a new 1tb m.2 ssd qnd cloned my msfs drive onto it.

So I now have a small SSD with everything on it except msfs, which is now on the 1tb ssd and a spare ssd I can use if either of my other drives starts to get too full.

I believe that once an ssd reaches 80% full, you start to get performance loss, so that is something to be mindful of.

Whilst on the subject of ssd drives, I no longer use a running cache as it will quickly wear out with the thousands of write operations it has to perform.

But to answer your question, Yes, it is better to have msfs on a separate drive if you can, but it will work fine on your C drive so long as you never have to reinstall windows.

Edited September 24, 2021 by cianpars