Although the T166 is supposed to have 166GB platters, the 320GB model has five heads reading from three platters, so it performs more like a 128GB-per-platter disk. This explains why it only managed an average sustained reading speed of 68.7MB/sec in HD Tach 3 RW, with writing at 67MB/sec. However, it managed a decent average access time of 14.2ms.

The T166's level loading abilities in Crysis were decent, and placed it in the top half of this benchmark. However, its Gimp image editing performance was nothing short of atrocious, coming third from the bottom. Languishing this low in the benchmarks isn't a failing we expect from a Samsung drive these days.

The SpinPoint T166 is the cheapest 320GB drive, and costing 16p per GB, it's very competitive. However, this doesn't compensate for its dire performance, so we can't recommend it.

• 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

• Western Digital Caviar Blue (640GB) - Hard disks / storage
• 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