I just upgraded to the system you see above. It runs in 2K at max settings wonderfully, 60 FPS.
That’s not my point though. The drives are:
1 TB SSD
2 TB HDD
I decided that since absolutely nothing else is going on this PC except for MSFS that I would put everything on the SSD. It performs wonderfully. Startup of the sim is very fast, and from World Map to Ready to Fly is like 15 seconds.
Right now I have 492 GB still free on the SSD. I have MSFS, all the World Updates, and about 60 GB worth of stuff in my Community folder. It’s not like I am going to run out of space tomorrow. BUT, I do have an empty 2 TB HDD sitting there. Is the good performance I’m seeing (either in loading or game performance) at least in part due to the fact that I have everything on the SSD? Or would the loading times and sim performance be pretty much the same if I moved my Official and Community folders to the HDD.
On my old system that’s how I had it: Sim on C, Community and Official on D. It loaded and ran slower than it does now, but that was a much less capable system in terms of CPU/GPU. So I’m just not sure.
Part of the reason I ask is because I’m interested in joining the Beta, and I know it’s best for the Beta to have your Official and Community folders on another drive for Store users.
You would certainly experience slower loading times and personally I would only use traditional HDD for storage of files like picture and other documents these days. You can pick up a 1TB SSD for under £100 or a 2TB SSD for around £160, at those kind of prices I would rather invest in another SSD and not compromise on loading times or potential degraded performance when loading scenery as you fly etc.
Even for backups it’s a risk these days to put anything on HDD. What year is that drive?
Does the new motherboard have any of the NVMe storage? If so, you should invest there and when it comes time to reset, install on the NVMe drive.
My system only has 2 NVMe PCIe4 drives. No HDDs. I have two Samsung Pros a 2TB for C: and a 1TB as My F: drive.
I use MSFS ADD-on Linker and all my Community stuff is on my F: drive. So, as other have said, don’t use HDDs for the sim. I also have DCS and xPlane on F:.
I do photography and I’m into music and have huge collection of both which I keep on a NAS as my D: drive. The NAS has four 18TB drives on it running RAID 10, so in essence I end up with 36TB usable space. That NAS currently has 19.5TB free, so plenty of room to grow.
I have a second NAS with 16TB that I use to backup my four PCs.
Yeah, I think this is going to be the answer. It is indeed a prebuilt. Once I start getting nervous about the free space left on the C drive I’ll buy a new SSD for the second drive and replace it. Simple enough.