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The UKTrainSimLive Exhibition Laptops are something like six years old now - they were absolutely top of the range when we got them and so after six years they are still doing pretty well - but there's only so much you can do to a laptop to upgrade it.

The machine had a Serial-ATA 150 (SATA-1) drive, 7200rpm, 100GB. It's done pretty well, at the time, SATA-1 was the best system around. These days there are other alternatives.

I just picked up an OCZ Vertex 2 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk from ebuyer for approximately £170 including VAT (I see they've already come down about £10 since I got this one!). The disk is a SATA-2 drive capable of supporting 6 GB/s interfaces - which obviously this old machine is far from being able to do.

The good news is that SATA is backwards compatible, you can put the latest SATA-2 drives in to an old SATA-1 system and it will work, just at the lower SATA-1 speeds of course.

What's an SSD?

Instead of being a physical disc with heads that move around and magnetic data, an SSD is much more similar to that Micro-SD card that you put in your mobile phone. It's just memory, but memory that doesn't get lost when the power goes out.

The benefits of SSD these days are that they are many orders of magnitude faster then traditional discs and "seek" times (the time taken to go from one part of the disk to another so it can get the contents from there) are zero, this means that "random access" is lightning fast. Additionally, coming straight off memory it can easily fill your SATA bus bandwidth so you get the data as fast as a disk can possibly give it to you.

Installation is a breeze - it looks, works and feels exactly like a normal hard drive, so don't treat it any differently (though there are many that recommend against using defrag software on them for various good reasons - basically because it doesn't make so much sense with a memory-based device rather than a magnetic one).

So what does that mean in practice?

It means that in a full run of the Somerset and Dorset on MSTS while testing activities this weekend, which takes a couple of hours, I think I saw the screen stutter briefly once, because loading scenery is now significantly faster.

For RailWorks, RailWorks now loads much faster and again, while RailWorks doesn't tend to suffer as badly from the stutter as MSTS it still does occasionally - but with an SSD you iron almost all the remaining bumps out too.

You can get SSD's for your laptop in 2.5" format, and for your desktop in 3.5" format. Indeed, the OCZ unit that I got (a 2.5" drive) also comes with a 3.5" bracket.

For the absolute ultimate performance, try getting a pair of them and running them in a RAID-0 (striped) configuration - though that's starting to get a bit costly :)

So there you have it - if you're looking for a way to squeeze a bit more life out of what you've got and you can afford the price of the disk then I have to say that an SSD is a good place to start looking.

It might be worth looking at a smaller SSD to put your boot partition and your more disk intensive things (e.g. MSTS and RailWorks) and leave your normal apps on a regular hard drive - the smaller SSD's are a fair bit cheaper than the 100GB+ ones.

As with all things, do your own reading and see what you think - the above is certainly my experience and I shall definitely be aiming to go SSD on all future machines.

Matt.

UKTrainSim