I’ve been running out of space on my C drive - no matter what I try and move and so on it’s just bloating to take up 80%+ of my 500GB Crucial NVMe M2 NAND drive. So I went looking for an upgrade and found that Crucial have a sale on. They are much cheaper even than Amazon UK right now - so I just grabbed myself a 2TB upgrade - that’ll do.
You can buy up to 3 discounted products:
I got this one - the normal price shown (£164) is the Amazon price, so £119 ain’t bad at all 
For some strange reason, the only SSDs that run stable in my system are the Samsung EVOs. I’ve hit zero for four attempting to add Crucial, WD, Sandisk and Silicon Power drives. Thank goodness, Amazon did not give me a hard time with my exchanges and returns. Finally went back to Samsung.
I have a 1TB NVMe C drive (Samsung), but even that would fill up pretty damn quick, so installed a 4TB Crucial SATA SSD as a backup/D drive. I went ‘small form factor’ and mini/micro ATX with my last build, so only have a single M.2 slot.
I have kept DCS on the NVMe but all my other games run fine off a SATA SSD…
Update: @Johnny Not just the UK, NVMe drives are about as cheap as I have seen them here in .au
At one of my ‘go to’ hardware stores, PCIE 4.0 aren’t bad but PCIE 3.0 are dirt cheap.
https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/hard-drives-&-ssds/solid-state-drives-ssd?page=1
Thanks for sharing this!
Great info gents!
On NVMe vs SATA, I just want to add: keep MSFS on NVMe as well if you can. Not because of loading times, but because of stutters (1% and 0.1% lowest FPS)
If you don’t have the M.2 slots, you can get an adapter for PCI-E to fit a couple of M.2.
If you don’t have spare PCI-E, you can probably use a high-speed USB port for another M.2
Yes, it’s a good point. This time around I kept FS on my C drive because that is my NVMe drive. I’ll be cloning it to the new 2TB one, which will likely take a long time, considering it will be 486GB worth (less whatever I can afford to uninstall and reinstall easily) of which 340GB is FS, even with the Community folder already symlinked to another SSD.
I’ve noticed an increase in loading times. Not necessarily the sim load time - they’ve remained at around 2½ minutes since a few updates ago, but flights. They were around 10 to 15 seconds for many versions, now they are at least 30 seconds and up to over a minute. Gotta be the symlink thing.
The crazy thing is, I have DCS World on my cheapest, rubbishy Drevo 2TB SSD - and it runs very smooth in VR! Loading times aren’t bad at all, either. I only use SSD now - 6 of them!
Like Harry, I only have one M2 NVMe slot on the mobo, however I do have a PCIe card which hosts both kinds of M2 together (2 slots). I may put my current NVMe on that, have to see how it performs. It didn’t do so well on my old ROG Asus Maximus VII.
I was hoping it would be here by now - they said 4-5 days, but it’s still in Holland and the process for a simple SSD is confusing me
Thanks for the info, I am in the same place as you, running out of C drive space. It’s all air force or navy manuals on mine so I downloaded the lot to Google drive and backed it all up on a Samsung 2.5 inch NVME SSD. Still I may get a new M.2 if they are on sale. Thanks again.
~500mb/sec sustained read vs 5000+mb/sec sustained…
Pretty easy.
I use a m.2 as my boot drive, in windows ready to go in 2 seconds from power button push.
I have to constantly maintain windows files though, making sure programs are installed to secondary SSD instead of boot m.2.
Constantly clearing caches, temp folders, log files… every few weeks gives me back almost 100gb each time.
Okay - drive has arrived. It has a 5 years warranty and a link to cloning software on the Crucial site - which I will have a look at. I normally use Macrium Reflect
WD Greens are on sale too for what it’s worth.
