Move P3D to a new SSD ?

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Hello everyone,

I currently have my P3D and a bunch of Add ons installed on my C:/ drive which is a Samsung 960 Evo M.2 NVME SSD. That drive's capacity is only 250Gb and it starts to be full. I am considering buying a new larger SSD. The problem is that I only have 1 M2 port on my motherboard.

First question, considering that I will mainly use my SSD for P3D, does all these "new generation" SSDs (NVMe with a speed > 3300Mb/s in writing/reading) make a huge difference with more a "classic" SSD with a wrinting/reading speed of 520Mb/s ?

Second question, is there a simple way to migrate all my P3D stuff (application + addons) to that new SSD without having to unsinstall and reinstall everything ? I have 2 possibilities:
- If I buy a new NVMe SSD, I will have to make a clone of my curent SSD that everything goes on the new SSD since I only have 1 M2 port
- If I buy a classic SSD, does P3D like moving to another drive ? Which program would you recommand to make the image ?

Thanks in advance for your huge help !

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In normal use, the faster device speeds translates to faster loading times but one P3D is running there is no noticeable impact due to the large amount of scenery cache that is used in the program.

Moving P3D from one drive to another requires that you must uninstall P3D first then reinstall to new location. Any addon that uses the legacy methods of adding addons (scenery.cfg, dll.xml, etc) must be reinstalled. Addons using the recommended addon method (add-on.cfg, add-on.xml, etc) will be found by the new P3D installation, and that is why this is the recommended method. However, if you want to save space on that VERY small system drive you will probably want to move large scenery addons anyway. One approach to move the files but allow their address to appear the same is to use a symbolic link...., depends on your computer savey.

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In normal use, the faster device speeds translates to faster loading times but one P3D is running there is no noticeable impact due to the large amount of scenery cache that is used in the program.

Moving P3D from one drive to another requires that you must uninstall P3D first then reinstall to new location. Any addon that uses the legacy methods of adding addons (scenery.cfg, dll.xml, etc) must be reinstalled. Addons using the recommended addon method (add-on.cfg, add-on.xml, etc) will be found by the new P3D installation, and that is why this is the recommended method. However, if you want to save space on that VERY small system drive you will probably want to move large scenery addons anyway. One approach to move the files but allow their address to appear the same is to use a symbolic link...., depends on your computer savey.

Thanks to your answer I just bought a Samsung Evo 850 SSD of 1 To, it is quite good from what I read. I will then install all my P3D stuff on it.
Do you recommend keeping the OS on the nVME ? Does P3D manages well the fact of not being on the same drive as the OS and drivers ?

[downscc]

Thanks to your answer I just bought a Samsung Evo 850 SSD of 1 To, it is quite good from what I read. I will then install all my P3D stuff on it.
Do you recommend keeping the OS on the nVME ? Does P3D manages well the fact of not being on the same drive as the OS and drivers ?

Keep the OS on the NVMe drive, use the second SSD as your d: drive and put P3D there where is will work just fine being on a different drive. Keep in mind that P3D will use 10-20GB of space on the system drive even if installed on a different drive.

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Thanks to your answer I just bought a Samsung Evo 850 SSD of 1 To, it is quite good from what I read. I will then install all my P3D stuff on it.
Do you recommend keeping the OS on the nVME ? Does P3D manages well the fact of not being on the same drive as the OS and drivers ?

Keep the OS on the NVMe drive, use the second SSD as your d: drive and put P3D there where is will work just fine being on a different drive. Keep in mind that P3D will use 10-20GB of space on the system drive even if installed on a different drive.

Thank you. It uses indeed some GB of space on the System drive but nothing compared to what I had before ! By the way I did not deleted that specific directory before reinstalling P3D (C:\ProgramData right ?), do you think it could mess things up ? Until now the only thing I saw was that I had exactly the same configuration (all the configuration sliders in P3D options), which actually saved me some time but I don't know if it could lead to some issues in the future ?

Just in case it may help someone trying to do the same stuff in the future:
- Uninstall every Add on you have using the Control Panel, or the add on uninstallers
- Delete all directories, registry keys and things related to your P3D on the initial SSD
- Install your P3D from scratch on the new SSD, the Add ons as well

And it should work like a charm, I did not have any directory pointing issues with any of the add ons I installed. Just becarful when you install them that they correctly find your P3D directory on the new SSD.