Our third encounter with the new Deskstar P7K500 range doesn't bowl us over. With its 400GB capacity spread over two platters, this model offers the lowest areal density of any of the P7K500 drives, although 200GB per platter is still reasonable. Its HD Tach 3 RW results were middle-of-the-road, with a 72MB/sec average sustained read rate and 69.5MB/sec when writing, as well as the characteristically appalling 18ms-plusaccess time that all the P7K500s exhibit.

The P7K500 came bottom of the class among this month's 400GB drives when loading the Relic level in Crysis, and was in the bottom half of the entire Labs test. The P7K500 was similarly mediocre in the Gimp image editing benchmark. Its score of 967 was the same as that of the Seagate Barracuda ES, but slower than the Western Digital Caviar SE.

As with the other drives in Hitachi's P7K500 range, the 400GB model has commendably low power consumption, requiring just 4.5W when idle. However, it's also one of the most expensive 400GB drives - another common factor among the P7K500s.

• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008

• Creative Zen X-Fi with Wireless LAN 16GB - Peripherals
• DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS PLUS - Motherboards
• Hyundai W240D-PVA - TFT monitors
• Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD - Hard disks / storage
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky - Games
• LanCool Metal-Boned K10 - Cases
• Asus Maximus II Formula - Motherboards