I do have a dedicated drive for MSFS and a second one dedicated to my Community folder managed by MSFS Addons Linker. My only objective is too have better drive access performance by splitting the load.

11 hours ago, Noel said:

Nowadays with fast m.2 NVMe drives I like everything on one big drive--which is a 2Tb and as I only use this PC for MSFS and Ghost Recon: Wildlands I have mega room for expansion, and makes cloning/imaging uncomplicated.  In fact I make a full clone on an identical NVMe 2Tb every 6 mo or so in case of catastrophic failure.

That sounds like a great idea Noel. With my new computer I ordered an extra 2Tb drive for MSFS since I only have one PC. I plan to build up MSFS with plenty of add on's ect.

13 hours ago, Noel said:

Nowadays with fast m.2 NVMe drives I like everything on one big drive--which is a 2Tb and as I only use this PC for MSFS and Ghost Recon: Wildlands I have mega room for expansion, and makes cloning/imaging uncomplicated.  In fact I make a full clone on an identical NVMe 2Tb every 6 mo or so in case of catastrophic failure.

What do you clone with?  Macrium Reflect?  Acronis?  Something else?

I changed mine also to a Samsung 1 Tb SSD external drive.  Just make sure it is formatted in NTFS.  Mine wasn't and I had to reformat it.  Only take a minute or so.

Sure did shorten my path to the Community directory.

Roy

1 hour ago, Mace said:

What do you clone with?  Macrium Reflect?  Acronis?  Something else?

Both programs will work just fine.

1 TB nvme 2 drive form MFS and in the near future XP12 too...

System and ancillary applications in a 500 GB nvme 2 drive.

Windows 11.

Edited August 2, 20223 yr by jcomm

I have (2) M.2 drives one for the OS and one for MSFS.

I also have (4) SSD's. One for P3D, Drone videos, all other games, and a backup drive.

4 hours ago, Mace said:

What do you clone with?  Macrium Reflect?  Acronis?  Something else?

I found Macrium Reflect Free great to use.  For awhile I kept both m.2 drives in place and did dual booting, but it's messy and I don't recommend it.  MR got me out of a bind once when I couldn't boot correctly too.  So now I do the clone and turn the box off to remove the cloned drive before rebooting to the one drive.

Edited August 2, 20223 yr by Noel

On 8/1/2022 at 2:24 PM, hychewright said:

Just wondering how many of you have a dedicated drive just for MSFS 2020?  I've thought about it myself and I think I'll get a drive just for the sim.

Why would you want to do that? To get better performance? Maybe, just maybe, there was something to be gained by having stuff seperated on old fashioned hard disks but with SSD's I don't think you will gain anything. The only reason you might consider seperate SSD's is for 'general housekeeping' as Bert said but other than that you won't notice any difference with having everything on one or two or more disks.

I used to be rather fanatic with various disks in my PC, mainly to keep things seperated (for like when I wanted to reinstall Windows) but in my latest PC (bought a year ago) I went for 1 big NVme drive. I also don't have to think anymore about what disk and what folder to install something: I nowadays ALWAYS accept the default folder and just install everything with one click. So much easier than having to look for specific folders all the time during an install.

Performance is superb on my PC. Things have never looked better. And I am 1000% sure that putting more drives in  my PC would have been totally useless, specially when it comes to performance.

BTW Partitioning has to be avoided because that is an old fashioned housekeeping idea which will only hurt performance (although I doubt if it still will hurt performance with SSD's).

SSD's are sooooooo fast that even going from a rather cheap SSD to an expensive NVMe M.2 one will hardly give you any performance gains: those differences in performance can only be measured with benchmarks.

Edited August 3, 20223 yr by tup61

Also partitioning into different logical volumes on the same drive can be impractical, as you may need to change partition sizes down the road as you fill up the volumes. 

Hi, 

I have two: one internal 500 Gib Samsung SSD for the MSFS 2020 installation and another external USB 3.0 WD Black Gaming (8 Tb) for planes and sceneries managed by MFSFAddons Linker.

 Regards.

 

Edited August 3, 20223 yr by John Fields

6 hours ago, tup61 said:

Why would you want to do that? To get better performance? Maybe, just maybe, there was something to be gained by having stuff seperated on old fashioned hard disks but with SSD's I don't think you will gain anything. The only reason you might consider seperate SSD's is for 'general housekeeping' as Bert said but other than that you won't notice any difference with having everything on one or two or more disks.

I used to be rather fanatic with various disks in my PC, mainly to keep things seperated (for like when I wanted to reinstall Windows) but in my latest PC (bought a year ago) I went for 1 big NVme drive. I also don't have to think anymore about what disk and what folder to install something: I nowadays ALWAYS accept the default folder and just install everything with one click. So much easier than having to look for specific folders all the time during an install.

Performance is superb on my PC. Things have never looked better. And I am 1000% sure that putting more drives in  my PC would have been totally useless, specially when it comes to performance.

BTW Partitioning has to be avoided because that is an old fashioned housekeeping idea which will only hurt performance (although I doubt if it still will hurt performance with SSD's).

SSD's are sooooooo fast that even going from a rather cheap SSD to an expensive NVMe M.2 one will hardly give you any performance gains: those differences in performance can only be measured with benchmarks.

For me it's not for performance gain, my drives are all SSD's. I guess as you call it.........it's more for housekeeping. I just won't every thing that has to do with MSFS on one drive......purchasing aircraft, scenery, ect.  

Edited August 3, 20223 yr by hychewright

55 minutes ago, John Fields said:

Hi, 

I have two: one internal 500 Gib Samsung SSD for the MSFS 2020 installation and another external USB 3.0 WD Black Gaming (8 Tb) for planes and sceneries managed by MFSFAddons Linker.

 Regards.

 

Hi John, basically that is what I'm doing also.

1TB SSD for MSFS, DCS, Sturmovik.

I love Sturmovik Jan, have had it for several years and still get a kick flying it. Lots of action air combat! How do you like your Honeycomb Alpha & Bravo? I also have the Honeycomb Alpha and just ordered the Bravo.