Doesn’t matter. Most games aren’t going to take much advantage of 4000MB/s+ read/write speeds as it is on an NVME PCI-E Gen 4 drive.
So whether you use a PCI-E Gen 4 drive, or a Gen3 or SATA the difference is absolutely negligible as so far, unless its a PS5 or Series X exclusive game which will take advantage of the fast internal SSD - your load times are only go to differ by only a few seconds.
Some games, it doesn’t matter of its on a spinner or the fastest SSD on the market its going to load the same amount of time.
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The load times are all very dependent on my Community folder contents.
After a fresh MSFS install and nothing in the Community folder I can get 1 m 20 s using NVMe. But when I load in whatever is required with AddOn Linker - e.g. Navigraph, aircraft required, airport selections, ground traffic etc. this time will become very different.
So I have stopped comparing my loading times after moving to a gen 4 NVMe.
Thank you for your answer @AthenaGrey1, that’s a great reference point!
RECAP:
A - your startup time: 1min20s,
B - your exact SSD model: Western Digital Black SN850 1TB NVMe PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD drive
C - community folder was empty, after a fresh MSFS install
D - intro videos were switched off/skipped,
E - internet was ON,
F - your SSD benchmark results,
G - the Flight Simulator version: SU5 (1.18.13.0)
Edited with corrections after subsequent answer.
Fresh install was for SU5 with a new WD SN850 1TB. Nothing in Community folder. No intro video but internet was on.
Beats mine. Not by much but tbf apart from the fast start link I’ve done nothing else but restict stuff I’m not using from the folders
Hi everyone,
I apologize if my question is off-topic.
I’m running out of space due to a lot of addons + MSFS (on a 512GB SSD)
I just ordered a new 1TB SSD.
My question is what is the best solution to make everything merge?
Do I need to transfer everything to SSD nr 2 (new one)?
I’d highly appreciate an answer and I once again apologize if my question is off-topic.
I suggest you transfer just the Official and Community folders and their contents to the root of the new drive and update their file paths in the sim’s UserCfg.opt file … any problems and you can always reverse this. Make sure it shares the same file format as your system and if it’s external be sure your usb isn’t allowed to turn it off to save power.
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Much appreciated answer, thanks a lot!
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You’re welcome. By the way although scenery and aircraft should be fine I can’t guarantee any other mods will work as intended if they don’t register the new path automatically, in which case you must install them again but pointing to the new drive.
I’ll receive my SSD in the near coming days, I’ll let you know how it goes. In worst case I’ll have to do a clean install and start from scratch.
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It should work, at least it does for me but the only thing I have in Community is the JF Arrow III which has it’s own installer and Superspud’s EGNS that works just fine.
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For anyone else thinking of upgrading hardware I have to stress that NVme drives will likely make big difference once DX12 is supported for PC MSFS. Several SSD’s in RAID-0 could possibly offer similar speeds but I can’t say for certain if they will be compatible with Direct Storage, I’m guessing not.
Have you tried “High Performance” energy plan?
Yes, but that did not change the loading time.
I can’t get the recent update, it sends me to the Microsoft store but there is no update coming in the Microsoft store.
I installed the Xbox app from the Microsoft store and then the update for MSFS2020 appeared in the store and I was able to install it. However the download of the update when launching MSFS2020 gets stuck after a couple MB out of about 3.29GB, [2/53]. Keeps looping with “decompressing…” (I can’t read the whole filename, it disappears too quickly). No idea why.
This update process is getting worse and worse, a proper launcher is sorely needed to manage installs and updates. Thank you Microsoft and Asobo for providing me with the very worst install and updates management of all the apps and games I have ever experienced.
People still use mechanical spinning disks?!
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I ended up having to start the game, update, update downloads and installs one package, update gets stuck, close, restart the game, and so on for each of the remaining package, that means 52 times: what a great update process! The user experience is so awesome 
