Don’t forget there’s also the solution of the addon linker, which would allow you to move all your community addons to another drive and you wouldn’t have to change anything. I’m not sure, however, how well the addon linker works with items purchased from the Marketplace, but it should.
I planned ahead and have a 1TB drive for my OS and programs, and a separate 1 TB drive for MSFS, and I think I have FSX/Steam, there, too. Worst case, you’d have to uninstall MSFS and reinstall it on D:. Yes, however you purchased it knows you purchased it. Marketplace purchases are a different story, though. But they should transfer assuming all goes well.
Because I’m not aware that there are any new free aircraft.
If you are referring to payware aircraft you will run out of space on any SSD within a few month.
When I started back in Oct I had 200+ gb free with out MSFS. This computer has only simulator stuff including community mods which has about only 2 dozen livery and improvement mods nothing more.
And, yes, 200 GB is not enough. I’m more afraid 1 TB will not eventually be enough. I don’t think Asobo had any clue how many addons people will be downloading and using.
The fact they only allow a single “Community” directory is just stupid. Just because there is a solution of the addon linker given above doesn’t make that decision any less stupid.
You can disable (and delete any traces of) the rolling cache and manual cache.
Or you can set these to be on a different drive.* *Check that the original rolling/manual cache files actually get deleted. FS2020 didn’t do this automatically for me when I switched locations but manually deleting them afterwards seems to have worked fine.
You can also change the location of the community folder (at least on the steam version you can. I moved mine to a different drive and it also seemed to move the FS2020 “official” folder alongside it. - so this is all the default aircraft and also the stuff I bought from the marketplace.
That’s only going to get you so far though. At some point you are going to have to bite the bullet and add a lot more drive space.
It’s quite possible to transfer everything from your existing SSD to a new, bigger one - if you can affiord it get an NVMe SSD as they are faster still and MSFS really benefits (check your machine has an NVMe slot of course). 1TB min but bigger if you’ve got the cash to future proof it.
Depending on what slots you’ve got it can be simple or a bit fiddly. Whatever, a good SSD vendor (Crucial are particularly helpful) will provide instructions on how to do it, often with a video.
I kept my system etc. on the old SSD and moved MSFS onto the new drive (can do it via Windows Apps settings) which was the easiest to do. With hindsight I wish now I’d just done a fresh install onto the new drive as transferring does leave some necessary files behind. But it all works fine for now.
I have an internal fast 500GB drive. I also have an external SSD. I keep my Orbx library on it, AND all the Community add-ons live there, thanks to Addon Linker! That enables me to have all 3 sims (MSFS with TONS of add-ons, P3D with TONS of add-ons, and X-Plane stock barebones) on my system.
I have the core sim installed on my c: drive which is a 1tb NVMe. All sim content is on a second 1tb NVMe. I do use that second drive for other games as well, but eventually, I can see it being mostly used for MSFS content and add-ons.
As it fills up with MSFS stuff, I’ll likely start moving other games to my 2tb SATA SSD.