With 250GB per platter, the Seagate's HD Tach 3 RW results were good; its average sustained read time rocketed to 85.8MB/sec, although writing was a less notable 76.3MB/sec, and its average access time was just 15.2ms. However, this didn't make for stunning real-world performance. The Barracuda 7200.10 ranked in the top third of the drives when image editing with Gimp. However, it was the slowest 250GB drive in our Crysis level loading benchmark.

The Seagate is also one of the more expensive 250GB drives. Costing 19p per gigabyte, it's inferior value to its 320GB Barracuda 7200.10 sibling, so if you're after a 250GB disk, the Barracuda 7200.10 is one to pass over.

• 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

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