I’m going to be getting an SSD drive soon, as I’m starting to run short on space on my current HDD. Is it going to be better performance wise to reinstall MSFS onto the SSD drive or will it not really make any difference?
Thanks for any help.
It will probably speed up load times, but just how much is the real question.
Invest and go for M2 drive, if you go gen 4x you may get 7000m/s, thats 10x the speed of SATA SSD. I moved from gen 3x to 4x and the load time was reduced 50%.
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This is a good one Samsung EVO 970 Plus M.2. and it’s on sale at Alternate.
Once you plug it in there’s no going back.
It sets you up for DirectStorage as well.
Maybe consider 2TB…
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Hello,
I moved your post to PC & Hardware. This is where all hardware discussion (except peripherals) goes.
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Go for M2 drive.
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Except for the initial loading times you probably won’t see much of a difference in MSFS.
I’d still recommend moving the MSFS files to the new drive:
Copy your whole folder containing the Community and Official folders to the new drive and rename the folder on the old drive.
When starting MSFS, it will notice that you’re missing all the contents at the old location and there you simply select the new location. It will scan it and boot up as usual.
Once this is done you can delete the folder on the old drive completely.
I bought this one and made a big difference on my rig. Coming from a SATA SSD, loading reduced 50% and feels faster in general.
I bought an SSD Drive last week after asking myself the same question for a while. Installed it and made HDD Drive secondary. New MSFS and Windows install on the SSD Drive. MASSIVE DIFFERENCE.
Everything runs much faster and smoother even on my PC from 5 years ago. i5/8GB
I am not sure if I have space in my pc to insert an internal SSD Drive. Is it an option to use an extranal SSD drive connected via USB 3, or would this make no difference?
But your PC from 5 years ago had an HDD, right?
I basically guarantee you that except for loading times, you will never notice the difference of a SATA SSD to a PCIe 4.0 NVMe.
My SSD is totally bored during playing MSFS, just because there is not much read (and even less written) to it.
The main difference ingame will be random access times where an HDD is definitely slower, but the difference between different SSD types is negligible.
You’ll even won’t notice if you have your pagefile on your SSD and a low amount of RAM.
I went from a m.2 SATA SSD to a PCIe 3.0 NVMe, and except for slightly better loading times (where CPU is often still the bottleneck) there is no difference whatsoever. And the fact that Windows and my pagefile (have 16GB of RAM) are on the same drive doesn’t matter either.
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If your mainboard didn’t come with a heatsink for your M.2 these things are well worth the 20 odd dollars
Strangely my board came with a big heatsink over the secondary M.2 slot but the primary had none?
Yeah, I was talking about the difference between an HDD and SSD. Massive difference especially with menus/opening game/and general stability in my case.
Ok I have another question (and by now I’m sure its obvious I know very little about what I’m talking about). I’m looking into the M.2 drive, but currently on my motherboard the slot seems to be taken up by a Hynix SSD card. I think this has the EFI System Partition on it (but again, not sure).
I guess I’m asking if its possible to remove that, move the partition somewhere else and put the M.2 drive into that slot?
Sorry, I hope that makes sense 
You could clone the m.2 drive to another drive connected to yout PC, then swap the m.2 drive for the new one and then apply the clone to the new drive.
This involves a third drive since you need a location for the clone image to go to.
Based on your questions, I’m not sure if you should try cloning your drives yourself. Better look out for someone in your area or friends who could assist you (maybe someone has a spare SATA drive for the image).
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I upgraded recently to a NVMe drive from an old HDD that I’d been using for storing my games on. The loading times are definitely faster. It probably halves the load time. How long that time is anyway depends on the size of your community folder but regardless you will get faster loading times for sure.
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