If SSD floats your boat, and you can afford the hefty premium, the Crucial 128GB M4 SATA-600 (£170) is worth considering. If all of this sounds like too much hard work, we've dug out a few models that tick all the right boxes depending on your Mac. Also, look at the size of the onboard cache - a drive offering 32MB or even 64MB will outperform one offering 8MB. If you're buying a HDD, also look to replace your drive with a 7,200rpm model for maximum performance, although be aware this will generate more heat and consume more power than a slower 5,400rpm model.

All 2011 Mac models utilise the newer SATA-600 (6Gbp/s) standard, so opt for a SATA-600 model over the older SATA-300 model if possible. Whatever type and size of drive you decide to purchase, there are some other considerations to make that will have an effect on the performance of your new drive.

That's because the drive can cause some vibration and actually consumes more power than a traditional HDD drive. It's a lot less expensive at £80 for 500GB, but it's not all good news, particularly for MacBook owners.

Thanks to the drive's adaptive technology, your most frequently accessed files are placed on the SSD portion of the drive, which helps provide a notable performance improvement with reading (but not writing) files. As its name suggests, the MomentusXT Hybrid combines traditional HDD storage with a tiny amount of SSD (4GB). There is a third way in the form of a 2.5-inch hybrid drive from Seagate. You'll get a major performance boost, but you won't solve your disk space problem. The sad, unpalatable fact is that a 64GB SSD will cost you the same as a 2.5-inch 750MB or 3.5-inch 2TB HDD (around £90-100). But all of these benefits come with a hefty premium attached. SSDs are unbelievably quick compared to their sloth-like rivals, consume less power and are silent in operation, which makes them a perfect fit for MacBooks. You then need to choose between a traditional hard drive (HDD) or the newer, much faster solid-state drive (SSD). MacBook Airs don't use standard SATA drives - we cover this separately below. The other key consideration is that you pick the right size drive for your Mac - 2.5-inch for MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Minis, and 3.5-inch for Mac Pros. It's important you pick the right type of hard drive for your Mac: that means SATA rather than IDE for all Macs since 2006.

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