With 160GB platters, the Barracuda 7200.10's areal density should place it in the middle of the pack. However, its HD Tach 3 RW results are a mixed bag. The sustained average reading rate of 67.5MB/sec is reasonable, but it's hardly up there with the fastest drives this month, and its write speed of 59.3MB/sec is on the slow side. However, the average access time of 13.3ms is at the quicker end of the spectrum.

Despite this, the Barracuda 7200.10 performed well in our real-world tests. Its Gimp image editing result was very creditable, coming second among the 320GB drives, and in the top third overall. It was also in the top half for loading the Relic level in Crysis.

However, the Seagate is the most expensive 320GB drive, and ultimately, its performance doesn't outweigh the fact that you're paying 18p for each gigabyte, especially as other drives in this category are much more economical. Western Digital's Caviar SE16 is nearly as fast and much more keenly priced.

• 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
• CPUs - 21st December 2007

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