The 500GB Deskstar P7K500 is the largest of Hitachi's drives to use 250GB platters. The company's bigger disks use more platters to achieve their capacities.

As 250GB per platter is the highest density currently available - other than Samsung's SpinPoint F1 series - you'd expect the Deskstar P7K500 to provide excellent performance. However, fans of the Deskstar's legendary capabilities will be disappointed.

The first worrying signs emerged during the HD Tach 3 RW test. Although the sustained read and write scores of 81.1MB/sec and 78.5MB/sec respectively were commendable, the average access time of 18.6ms was the slowest of all the drives. This carried forward into the real-world tests, with the Deskstar P7K500 coming joint seventh from the bottom in the Gimp image editing benchmark, and sandwiched between a pair of 80GB disks. The time taken to load the Relic level in Crysis was slightly better, equalling Seagate's 500GB Barracuda 7200.11. However, the Deskstar was left in the middle of this month's collection of drives.

Costing 16p per gigabyte, the Deskstar P7K500 isn't particularly bad value. However, the 500GB SpinPoint T166 is nearly £22 cheaper, and there are better-value alternatives available in the 400GB and 750GB categories.

• 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

• SilverStone Crown CW03-MT - Cases
• Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP - TFT monitors
• Asus Xonar DX - Sound cards
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 - Graphics cards
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 - Graphics cards
• Asus Striker II Extreme - Motherboards
• Emprex NSD-100 P2P Download Engine - Peripherals