Verdict: Half a terabyte of storage doesn't come cheap

In their previous life at IBM, the engineers at Hitachi Global Storage led the way for stuffing bits onto disk platters. However, more recently, they've been content with merely stuffing an unfeasible number of platters into a 3.5in drive. As a result, Hitachi makes the world's biggest hard drives, but not necessarily the fastest.

In this respect, the 7K500 is no different from the 7K400 that preceded it. Although it has 100GB platters, rather than 80GB platters, its areal density is still well below the best in this Labs test. With this relatively low density, the 7K500 unsurprisingly posted the slowest average transfer rates by some margin, as measured by HD Tach 3 RW. Its Paint Shop Pro score was only average, but the Far Cry level load was slightly better.

However, both of these results were recorded with the drive in its default S-ATA mode. As with the T7K250, you need to download the Feature Tool applet from Hitachi's website and create a bootable floppy or CD with it, then use this to turn on S-ATA II mode. It's also worth noting that enabling S-ATA II will make the drive inaccessible by a S-ATA controller, so proceed with caution. Enabling S-ATA II had a marginal effect on the 7K500's performance in Paint Shop Pro, but gave a huge boost to game level loading, making the 7K500 and the T7K250 the fastest on test.

However, although the 7K500 is a good performer, the main reason you'd want it is for its huge half-terabyte capacity. At 44p per gigabyte, though, it's pretty poor value for money.

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