My PC has one Gen4 and one Gen3 NvME slots. I am adding a 2nd drive and OK with re-installing my OS. I want to do one drive dedicated to the OS drive and one dedicated to game storage. The machine is primarily used for MSFS and I am running the Steam version. For MSFS performance, am I better to go with the OS on the Gen4 or Gen3?
I could be wrong but I would think that the OS, Windows10/11,
is flying the airplane (executing the FS2020 code).
So, I would have it installed on the Gen4 slot.
It will make no discernible difference.
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Both OS and MSFS will use more or less 300Mb/s speed as maximum during normal operation and in most cases they are going to use values lower than 100Mb/s or even close to 1Mb/s, as far as I have seen (I have 7000Mb/s disks), because they are not reading large data in one go during most of the time. And those figures are even below the Gen1 max speeds. Even during the game installation process the download speed will be the limiting factor and the disk speeds will be also low. So basically it will make no big difference to install things on the 3.0 or 4.0 slot as you maybe reach their top design speeds once a week at very particular cases.
I would put OS and my faster disk (in case they have different speeds) on the 4.0 but just because windows is going to read more data more frequently everyday and also store many temp files while you do your daily common tasks while MSFS will just read the bigger amount of data mainly during game launch and during initial flight loading but not all the time while flying, so MSFS will use speed just for shorter periods of time but Windows can potentially take advantage of the faster speeds more frequently if required. But as said before it won´t really make so much difference at the end anything equal to or above Gen3 speeds will be fine in most cases for basically everything which is a normal PC usage.
Cheers
Thanks all! That make sense. I’ll do the OS (Win11) on the Gen4 and use the Gen3 for the game data. I appreciate the thought out responses and explanations!
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