Like the Hitachi P7K500 and Maxtor DiamondMax 21, the Samsung SpinPoint S250 manages to cram its entire 250GB capacity onto a single platter. Despite the high areal density, the SpinPoint S250 didn't bowl us over in the performance tests. The HD Tach 3 RW results were promising, with a stunning 90.3MB/sec average sustained reading speed and 84.2MB/sec writing speed. The 13.9ms access time was less head turning, but faster than many of the other disks.

However, the SpinPoint S250 wasn't particularly fast in our test applications. The Gimp image editing score of 966 was in the bottom half of the table, although Hitachi's Deskstar P7K500 and Maxtor's DiamondMax 21 were slower. The SpinPoint S250 was slower than the Western Digital and Maxtor 250GB when loading the Relic level of Crysis.

The SpinPoint S250 is relatively good value at 17p per gigabyte, but Western Digital's 250GB Caviar SE16 is the same price and faster, making the S250 merely middle-of-the-road.

• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008

• Samsung SATA SSD 32GB - Hard disks / storage
• Spore - Games
• Zalman VF1000-LED - Other cooling hardware
• Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev 2 - Other cooling hardware
• Antec Mini P180 - Cases
• Turok - Games
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Graphics cards