NEC ND-3540A DVD writer

If you plan to save a lot of media to DVD, such as photos and video, a dual-layer recordable DVD drive is definitely worth the investment.

The ND-3540A from NEC is the company's fastest ever, and can read and write to all major disc formats except DVD-Rom. It's easy to install and is available in silver, black and grey.

It may look like a standard DVD drive, but its speed is impressive. In our tests it copied a disc full of data to a dual-layer DVD-R at 4x speed in just over 27 minutes. CD performance is also good, burning CD-Rs at 48x and CD-RWs at 32x.

It can fit up to 8.5Gb of storage on to a single DVD, which works out at roughly 2,000 music files, for example. It automatically recognises which media you've inserted and selects the correct recording speed.

Its most likeable feature, though, is its price tag. Available from £49 (or around £35 without software included), this drive is attractive both in terms of its performance and price.