So here’s the thing: I have a decent but not mindblowing spec machine, AMD Quad-core @4GHz, 32Gb RAM, nVidea GTX1660 Super. I have three installed HDs: one is a 500Gb SSD, then a 250Gb SSD and a 4Tb normal hard drive.
My problem was that although I only use my main SSD to install progs/apps, MSFS20 was eating it up and I was down to just over 50GBs space. When I went to run the FS, it said there was an update but it was 61Gbs (still haven’t fogured out what it does but never mind).
I had read on here someone who said they had uninstalled their FS and reinstalled to a bigger HD as they had the same problem. But when I went to the Uninstall (Add remove progs) I saw a button that said ‘Move’ so I thought nothing ventured nothing gained and tried moving FS across to my 4TB hard drive which still had 3.5TBs space on it. It took ages of course, well a couple of hours I think, and then I decided to try running FS again from the same link as before on my taskbar, no change made. I did NOT expect it to run, I thought I’d have to tell it to look elsewhere, i.e. to my E Drive. Nope, it ran first time. I then did the update which took just over an hour to download and install 61Gbs which I was pretty amazed at (I do have a 350Mbps cable broadband so that helps). I then continued to run but expected it to be slower and to have to make a lot of adjustments as its not on an SSD anymore. Nope again, ran perfectly and even started quicker. All my flightsim.to add-ons still worked perfectly and the framerate has even gone up!
Now, I know this is a lot of waffling but just thought this info might be useful for anyone else thinking they might have to deinstall and reinstall to a bigger drive if your FS is eating up the space. You don’t need to. Just ‘move’ it using the control panel add and remove progs button and it will do the whole thing for you. My FS has never run better and I am thrilled
@RobBarron5778 Rob, I’m certainly glad that you’re up and running with improved performance, but at some point, running MSFS from a spinner (what I call an HDD) is going to bite you in the posterior. Not only is the game itself simply not designed to be stored on or used from spinners, in today’s world, I don’t recommend having so much as a single HDD in a PC unless you’re using it to store large amounts of video files, and even then only for storing and viewing, not editing.
SSDs are not the future, they’re the NOW, and with what they cost compared to just a few short years ago, munee is not an objection.
I actually take it a step further and recommend not storing video/movie files locally at all, rather putting them on a NAS. (Spinners are fine for NASes, but make sure you get actual NAS drives.) But with a NAS, munee does become an issue, and unless you have a lot of movies (I’m over 8TB, and that is going to start growing rapidly now that I’m leaning towards only 4k resolution if at all possible), and are going to use other NAS features (like backups, which is a good idea), storage for security, that kind of stuff, a NAS may not be the right solution for you, in addition to the munee issue.
But I would recommend it the strongest possible terms that I can think of to put MSFS on an SSD, even if you have to get it a dedicated one. They’re inexpensive enough now that doing so is not an issue. Just do it! (#nike)
I was thinking recently to make a post similar to yours. I am kind of in the same situation. I don’t currently run a super computer though I do plan to build an i9 system within the coming year or so.
I run MSFS on an ASRock Z87 Extreme6 with an i5 4670K @4.5 GHz, 32GB Corsair Vengeance with EVGA 1070 FTW2 graphics. I have the OS installed on a 250 GB Samsung EVO 850 SSD with MSFS on another SSD though a 500GB version of the 850 EVO. I put 30GB of rolling cache on another SSD then followed it up with 20GB of Pagefile on another SSD which are the same 850 EVOs though in 1TB size, so it’s spread out over multiple drives. It might sound overkill to some, but doing it this way I believe has resulted in a rather optimized experience. I couldn’t be happier with it right now considering the hardware I am running the sim on.
I read many posts describing terrible performance on systems that are far more powerful than mine and it makes me wonder.
Microsoft/Asobo have really made a seamless experience too with installing MSFS and even in the event you find yourself having to reinstall the sim, (possible issues caused by running Disk Cleanup) the experience is still seamless. Perhaps it has been this way for me because when I did install it, I had performed a clean installation of the OS along with all drivers being the most current versions. Have been playing since April with no crashes. Of course there are bugs here and there though between Asobo and the Community those bugs are or will be squashed.
