The 500GB SpinPoint T166 was the winner of last year's hard disk Labs test, so we were keen to see how far hard disks have progressed in a year. We found that thay have gone some distance. While the T166's 166GB platters were state-of-the-art in Issue 45, they're now pedestrian. In fact, Samsung has nearly doubled the areal density in its latest SpinPoint F1 series.

This meant that the SpinPoint T166 wouldn't be able to retain its performance crown. Indeed, its HD Tach 3 RW scores were very pedestrian by current standards, with an average sustained reading rate of 66.2MB/sec, a write speed of 57.7MB/sec, and a 14.5ms access time. The Gimp test score of 965 is middle-of-the-road, although it loaded Crysis very quickly and was equal fourth of all the drives.

However, if the SpinPoint T166's performance has been surpassed, it has another advantage this time around - its price of £56.99 works out as an unbeatable 12p per GB. The Caviar AV's image editing performance gives it the edge, but if you only have £57 to spend on a hard disk, forget cheaper 400GB models and get an extra 100GB for just a fiver more.

• 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