I have a 1TB SSD and 4TB HD, which has just failed.  I don't think I have ever used much of the capacity of the 4TB HD.  and AFIK have never exceeded the capacity of the SSD. I will replace the HD. Any recommendations for how much storage I should buy?

Thanks

I guess the key question is:  how much of the 4Tb was occupied before it failed?  Are you aiming to put FS on the new replacement drive?  If so, 2Tb is more than ample if your FS is on the 1Tb SSD now, and as MSFS 2024 is purported to require less local storage I would imagine 2Tb on a new m.2 NVMe drive would be used for MSFS, and put data on the surviving 1Tb SSD, if your mother board can do m.2 drives.

18 hours ago, AviatorMan said:

I have a 1TB SSD and 4TB HD, which has just failed.  I don't think I have ever used much of the capacity of the 4TB HD.  and AFIK have never exceeded the capacity of the SSD. I will replace the HD. Any recommendations for how much storage I should buy?

Thanks

How much do you need? 🙂

BTW 2 TB is the sweet spot now.

My experience has always been that whatever size HD/SSD I buy, I always end up filling it and wish I had bought a bigger one. 

My MSFS installation and addons are currently using 1.75 TB on their own and I've had to cull a few addons to avoid using up my 2 TB drive completely.

Summary - how ever big your hard drive is, you would always like a bigger one.  Size matters.

2TB M.2 drives from Samsung are going for less than $200 these days - I bought one and along with 2 other 2TB SSDs, it's the primary storage for my sim and a couple of games that benefit from the higher transfer rate.

One thing that I think is helpful - I've replaced my legacy optical drives with an 18TB external WD drive. Never put a game or sim on it, it will suck terribly, but it's a great cold warehouse for downloads, long term storage, etc. to get them off the SSDs.

The price of SSD's has come down a lot the last time I checked a couple of weeks ago. I nearly picked up a 2tb version of my 980 Pro's for £130. I just looked on Currys.co.uk and you can still get one for less than £140 which is almost irresistable for me.

I have no idea if your motherboared can natively support 2 SSD's or what type it does but if it doesn't support more you could always get a PCIe expansion card to put the SSD in and then slot it into one of your PCIe slots.

Buying legacy optical HDD's is, well,l silly these days. They perform dreadfully, take up too much space and are noisy. Apart from using one in the way mspencer mentions above as a massive external storage I see no logic in owning one at all in 2023.

On 12/12/2023 at 10:20 AM, Jazz said:

Buying legacy optical HDD's is, well,l silly these days.

Ive never even seen one😁

 

On 12/11/2023 at 2:37 PM, AviatorMan said:

I have a 1TB SSD and 4TB HD, which has just failed.  I don't think I have ever used much of the capacity of the 4TB HD.  and AFIK have never exceeded the capacity of the SSD. I will replace the HD. Any recommendations for how much storage I should buy?

Thanks

So you are asking a bunch of strangers on the internet how much storage you should buy, without even saying what you expect to store (presumably not just MSFS and presumably something you yourself know)

This is like primary school level maths..I despair

Edited December 14, 20232 yr by Pathfinder633

On 12/12/2023 at 5:20 AM, Jazz said:

Buying legacy optical HDD's is, well,l silly these days.

OK. I usually resist but today I'm going to be "that guy" and say that HDDs are magnetic storage not optical. CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives are optical but they are not "HDDs".

As for buying hard disks being "silly", there are still arguments in favour of them. For one they offer a much better price per gigabyte compared to solid state. So if storage capacity is more important than read/write performance, spinning platters is still the way to go.

But back to the original topic: I agree with the prior posters who have stated that:
a) only _you_ know now much storage you'll need; and,
b) buy the largest NVMe drive that fits your budget because you _will_ fill it even if it's twice a large as what you have now.

 Buy as much as your budget can afford. What's so hard about that?

Edited December 14, 20232 yr by JamesIL
spelling error

32 minutes ago, Malaromane said:

OK. I usually resist but today I'm going to be "that guy" and say that HDDs are magnetic storage not optical. CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives are optical but they are not "HDDs".

Quite right, not sure what I was thinking.

32 minutes ago, Malaromane said:

As for buying hard disks being "silly", there are still arguments in favour of them. For one they offer a much better price per gigabyte compared to solid state. So if storage capacity is more important than read/write performance, spinning platters is still the way to go.

I sort of made that point. However, I believe they are unjustifyable these days unless you need many terabytes of just plain old storage. And I do mean many terabytes.

 

8 minutes ago, Jazz said:

I sort of made that point. However, I believe they are unjustifyable these days unless you need many terabytes of just plain old storage. And I do mean many terabytes.

 A quick look on Amazon UK reveals that a 4 TB SSD is roughly twice as expensive as a 4 TB HDD
and that a 4 TB M2 SSD is roughly half as much again as a 4 TB SSD.

There is no room for argument about speeds, but if the purchaser is not as rich as Croesus, then
there may well be a strong financial motive.

My own choice is to use HDDs for storage and backup but the only difference between XP 11,
entirely on an HDD and XP12, entirely on an M2 SSD, is the time that it takes to load.

Edited December 14, 20232 yr by Reader