Hi all

i am just upgrading from intel to amd 

I have had win 11 on my Samsung 2.5 500gb ssd

the flightsim on my Samsung m.2 500 gb

should i swop these around so win 11 is on my m.2 

or does it not matter, been thinking os should be on fastest drive am I wrong

any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated 

I'd say you want MSFS on your fastest drive, OS second.

Your Windows drive is your boot drive faster the better. Start any game or program it will look in your windows drive. The registry that runs everything is there.

Thank you for your replies I need to make decision

As long as windows in on an SSD which you said it is, it will be fast enough, I would use the M.2 drive for flight sim, as it is likely faster.

If you just upgraded  chances are that your motherboard supports multiple m.2 drives so you might have your cake and eat it too.

Also, 500gb is not a lot regarding msfs. I just replaced my 2tb m.2 with a 4tb one because it was filling up. SSD's including m.2 become slower when the drive is ~90% full.

So if you have 2 m.2 slots, use the 500gb m.2 for windows and buy a new m.2 for MSFS. 2tb m.2 drives aren't that expensive these days.

Edited January 5, 20242 yr by orchestra_nl

16 hours ago, orchestra_nl said:

SSD's including m.2 become slower when the drive is ~90% full.

2010 called, they want their crummy SSDs back.

On 1/5/2024 at 3:02 PM, orchestra_nl said:

Also, 500gb is not a lot regarding msfs. I just replaced my 2tb m.2 with a 4tb one because it was filling up. SSD's including m.2 become slower when the drive is ~90% full.

So if you have 2 m.2 slots, use the 500gb m.2 for windows and buy a new m.2 for MSFS. 2tb m.2 drives aren't that expensive these days.

Writes to SSDs slow down with a nearly-full drive.  So a program like a flight simulator where the vast majority of the storage I/O is read-only isn't affected that much.

Also, the old wisdom of putting the OS on a different drive than flight sim has been OBE--the old way was intended to prevent lots of slow I/O due to head thrashing as the drive serviced an OS on one part of the drive and the sim on another.  SSDs are random-access...there's no real advantage to separating them anymore.

A single large (e.g. 4TB) or a couple medium (1-2 TB) SSDs is the config I'd recommend today.  I'd shelve the old 500GB drive or maybe put it in a gaming box for the grandkids.