Solid State Disks, or SSDs, are designed to replace hard disks in computers. Unlike hard disks, which have moving parts, they use the same type of memory found in USB memory keys.

At just £75 Kingston’s 40GB SSD kit is the cheapest we have seen.

The kit includes the disk itself, the cables and bracket needed to fit it into a desktop PC and a program that can copy the contents of your entire hard disk onto the new SSD in one go.

If you have less than 40GB of files on your hard disk this is a simple process, but if not you will have to move some to another storage device first – the process copies everything in one go.

The main advantage of an SSD is speed. We copied a new Windows 7 system from hard disk to the SSD: with the hard disk the computer took 52 seconds to start, but on the SSD this was cut to 35 seconds.

Files copied at 15MB/sec on the hard disk and 24MB/sec on the SSD. It’s also silent, and with no moving parts it should be more reliable than a hard disk.

By modern standards 40GB isn’t much space so this SSD would best be used to store Windows and programs, with your files stored on a separate hard disk. It’s expensive per gigabyte, but this is a simple way to give a computer a real speed boost.