Samsung's hard disk specifications require knowledge of the occult to fully understand them - that, or a close relationship with a Samsung technical specialist. The SpinPoint T166 is nominally a drive with 166GB platters. However, it has three platters and six heads to achieve its 400GB capacity, so the actual amount of data on each platter is closer to 133GB.

As a result, the SpinPoint T166 didn't repeat its 500GB sibling's success in last year's hard disk Labs test when it came to performance. The HD Tach 3 RW results were pretty dismal, with the slowest sustained reading time this month of 56.1MB/sec, and an even less appealing 48.8MB/sec when writing. The average access time was a relatively pedestrian 14.4ms.

These results were mirrored by similarly unimpressive real-world performance results. Although the SpinPoint T166's time to load Crysis was reasonable, its score of 960 in our Gimp image editing test is fifth from the bottom in the entire Labs test. Clearly, its lack of throughput holds back its performance.

Like most Samsung drives, the 400GB SpinPoint T166 is good value for money in terms of capacity, costing 15p per gigabyte. However, with Western Digital's faster Caviar SE only £1 more expensive, the SpinPoint T166 can't redeem itself.

• 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

• Cooler Master Cosmos S - Cases
• Lian Li PC-P60 Armorsuit - Cases
• Asus Rampage Formula - Motherboards
• Gigabyte GV-NX96T512H-B - Graphics cards
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 - Processors
• Akasa Vortexx Neo - Other cooling hardware
• Zerotherm Hurricane HC92-Cu 8800 - Other cooling hardware