Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB solid-state disk

Like the OCZ disk (click here to read our review), the Kingston SSDNow V100 is a solid state disk (SSD), designed to replace your computer's main hard disk to provide much faster loading and operating times for Windows and other programs.

Although its RRP is higher, on the high street and online it costs around the same as, or slightly less than, the OCZ Vertex 2, and offers roughly the same amount of space (8GB more, to be precise). That's more than enough to store Windows and several programs, and it's best to keep a separate hard disk for other programs and documents, music and videos.

Our tests showed it performing much faster than a hard disk but around 25 per cent slower than the OCZ device. That's still a big speed increase but overall we would go with the OCZ on the basis that a slight increase in the cost will result in faster computing overall, and over the longterm.

Also, like the OCZ disk this is a 2.5in laptop-size disk that includes a bracket to fit a desktop computer along with software and a cable for transferring data from the old disk, but if you don't need those it can be found even cheaper.