MSFS Installation on a seperate SSD?

[tymk 108]

18 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

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

I fully concur with Bert here as far as housekeeping goes.

In addition, keeping the OS and flight sim installations separate can be useful if you need to reinstall the OS (no risk of having the sim install accidentally deleted). Plus, as another example, I like to keep an image of my OS drive with all the important apps fully installed and configured. If anything goes wrong, I just reimage the OS drive while all the data (and fltght sim installation, for that matter) are safe on other drives.

[orchestra_nl 935]

2 hours ago, JimBrown said:

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

 

#Me too. Lost 1 TB of stuff which I could luckily replace without too much loss.

[swiesma 625]

5 hours ago, JimBrown said:

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

 

Installing windows is a matter of 10 minutes. Installing MSFS a matter of 2 hours. 
I can live with that on the rare case of a dead ssd. Important stuff is in the cloud, like docs, pictures, scripts, ini files 🙂

Edited September 24, 2021 by swiesma

[Noel 4,504]

On 9/23/2021 at 12:05 PM, Bert Pieke said:

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

How can you really beat the good housekeeping value of having everything on one well-sized high perf drive--you can't beat the simplicity of being able to clone the entire drive and all its contents to an identical drive, which is what I've done ever since SATA3 SSD's arrived.  On my current build (I keep them for ~6y) I have twin m.2 NVMe 2TB drives so once everything is loaded, including P3D and its gargantuan installation routine, I simply reclone it every 6 months or so as required if there are substantial changes to anything.  So if this drive crashes/dies, I just swap in its twin and we're up and running in a few minutes.  I'm fortunate to have the two drives that were only around $200 each when I bought them, and I have massive room left on them despite both simulator installs and a few games.  I believe the whole separate OS and everything else on separate drives is a legacy recommendation that applied in the age of HDD's but not now it's far messier ultimately.  

[CallsignDE 37]

Thanks for your answers! 

[DylanM 1,069]

On 9/23/2021 at 10:04 AM, 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.

Question - I'm just about install a new MB/CPU and OS drive, and am planning to go down a similar path.

Did you leave your MSFS install in-place on your secondary drive, reinstall your new drive and OS, then reinstall MSFS and point it to your existing secondary drive?

Thanks

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

1 hour ago, DylanM said:

Did you leave your MSFS install in-place on your secondary drive, reinstall your new drive and OS, then reinstall MSFS and point it to your existing secondary drive?

Some have reported success with this..

[JSmith2112 317]

There might be something to this idea if Direct Storage is ever implemented in FS2020. It would require a NVMe drive though.

[CallsignDE 37]

Just installed MSFS on its own dedicated SSD but "flightsimulator.exe" starts out of "WindowsApps" on my OS partition. Is that normal? 
Also, is it normal that i can download around 120 GiB of MSFS stuff after the installation with CDs?

[40track 80]

22 minutes ago, CallsignDE said:

Just installed MSFS on its own dedicated SSD but "flightsimulator.exe" starts out of "WindowsApps" on my OS partition. Is that normal? 
Also, is it normal that i can download around 120 GiB of MSFS stuff after the installation with CDs?

If after a new Windows reinstall you installed the app to c drive and directed it to run and update to your dedicated ssd MSFS directory and did then the huge content update then yes normal if its the DVD/Microsoft store version. You might have to have DVD 1 in drive to run it tho.

Edited September 28, 2021 by 40track