While the 250GB version of the Deskstar P7K500 takes advantage of the full areal density available to the range, the 320GB model has two platters and three heads. Not surprisingly, its HD Tach 3 RW average sustained throughput scores were poor, coming in at 71.3MB/sec when reading and just 68.8MB/sec when writing. The average access speed was a similarly dire 18.1ms.

The 320GB version of the P7K500 fared equally badly at loading the Relic level in Crysis, coming in ninth from the bottom in this test. Its score of 965 in our Gimp image editing test was identical to that of its 250GB sibling, so this second example of the P7K500 fails to redeem the range. Its power consumption isn't quite as low either, with 4.5W when idle - although it's still one of the least power-hungry drives on the market.

As the second most expensive 320GB drive, and costing a reasonable but not stunning 16p per gigabyte, the P7K500's fate is sealed. There are faster, better-value drives around.

• 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
• CPUs - 21st December 2007
• Motherboards - 13th November 2007

• ATI Radeon HD 4870 - Graphics cards
• NZXT Tempest - Cases
• Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ - Graphics cards
• AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition - Processors
• SilverStone Crown CW03-MT - Cases
• Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP - TFT monitors
• Asus Xonar DX - Sound cards