A discount is often available when you buy items in bulk quantities, but you really don't expect this benefit when it comes to hard disks. The largest capacity drives usually cost more per gigabyte than mid-capacity drives. While this continues to hold true for the top 1TB models, the 750GB alternatives are now extremely good value, costing £100 or so. The cost per gigabyte is equal to or better than smaller drives.

Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 is the most expensive of this quartet, and it's one of the slowest too. Its 187.5GB per platter aerial density is relatively low, and the benchmark results mirror this. Although it was joint sixth when loading the Relic level in Crysis, the 7K1000's Gimp image editing performance was average.

The HD Tach 3 RW sustained throughput scores were similarly mediocre, recording close to 70MB/sec when reading and writing. However, the Deskstar 7K1000's access time of 12.4ms was only beaten by Western Digital's 10,000rpm Raptor X.

The Deskstar 7K1000 is also one of the noisiest drives in this month's Labs test, thanks to its quartet of platters. Although the 750GB category now offers the most storage for your money, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 is neither the fastest nor the best-value disk among this selection.

• 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