Yet another Samsung drive reigns supreme in our performance benchmarks. The 1TB SpinPoint F1 topped the league at loading the Relic level in Crysis, and was only edged into second place by the Western Digital Raptor X in our Gimp image editing test. To put this in perspective, it was 45 per cent quicker at game loading than the slowest disks this month, and around 2 per cent faster at image editing.

A glance at the specifications explains how Samsung has pulled off this coup. Whereas other 1TB drives this month use four or even five platters to achieve their colossal capacity, the Samsung uses just three. That's a gob-smacking 333GB on each platter - the highest areal density we've seen in a hard disk so far. Not surprisingly, this gave it the fastest average sustained read speed of 96MB/sec, topping out at 113.3MB/sec at its outer sectors. Even the inner sectors were faster on average than some of this month's drives. While some drives beat it at writing, the SpinPoint F1's overall performance is unassailable.

It isn't particularly noisy or power-hungry either, although you pay quite a premium for this. The 1TB SpinPoint F1 is the most expensive disk in this month's Labs test, even though the huge capacity means that it works out at a cost of 20p per gigabyte. The biggest fly in its ointment, however, is the 750GB version of the same drive. With performance just one place below that of the 1TB version, and three-quarters of the capacity for half the price, the 750GB Samsung SpinPoint F1 makes much more sense. The 1TB drive is edged out by its own F1 teammate, but if you can spare the cash, it's awesome.

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB / SATA II / 7200rpm

SATA II, 1000 GB, 7200 rpm, 3.5"

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• 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

• ATI Radeon HD 4870 - Graphics cards
• NZXT Tempest - Cases
• Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ - Graphics cards
• AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition - Processors
• SilverStone Crown CW03-MT - Cases
• Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP - TFT monitors
• Asus Xonar DX - Sound cards