Hitachi likes big numbers, and was the first company to join the terabyte club back in 2007. Of course, it achieved this accolade by employing its usual method - that of cramming five platters into a regular 3.5in drive. The 7K1000's areal density isn't quite state-of-the-art these days, even compared with Hitachi's own P7K500 range. As a result, the 7K1000 came seventh in our Gimp image editing test, and was the slowest 1TB drive at loading the Relic level in Crysis.

The 7K1000's price is reasonable, working out at 19p per GB. However, even here it can't match the Western Digital Caviar GP, and Samsung's SpinPoint F1 blows it out of the running in every respect. The Hitachi 7K1000 may have been the world's first terabyte drive, but first isn't always best.

• 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