Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 - TechRadar UK

File sizes are on the rise; so are game installations, digital music and movie collections, and let's not forget Vista takes up 15GB of space.

Hard drives are cheaper than ever before, though; you can net yourself a 400GB SATA 300 drive with Native Command Queuing for a mere 57 pounds. There are few spots sweeter than that in the component world, and as the hard drive lacks the lip-gloss glamour of the tarting, high-profile CPUs and GPUs of this world, it's likely to stay that way.

But a terabyte of space... well, forgive us for this unscientific staccato-blast of enthusiasm, but OMFG! We get a bit flustered when capacities rise, and not just for the fact that it means larger storage.

Unlike almost every other technical improvement in the hardware world, there are beneficial side-effects to this rise in hard drive capacity. Bigger storage often means better overall drive performance, as more tightly packed data is easier to find.

But, curiously, another side-effect is higher burst speeds. This is the measurement of how much data is passed down the system bus to the RAM, so obviously, the higher the better.

The 1TB Deskstar offers burst-speeds far and away the highest we've ever seen. Measured against two other top-drawer drives, namely Western Digital's show-stopping 10000RPM Raptor, and Seagate's chunky-monkey speedster, the 750GB Barracuda, with its 32MB cache, flenses the pair of them into a bucket of chum with 35 percent greater burst speeds.

Which essentially translates into faster game loading, faster application-launching, and overall sweeter PC performance.

In other areas, it's mostly on a par with other modern drives.

The Deskstar is a high-performance hard drive, no question. But whether it's worth 252 pounds is the question. A pair of 500GB drives will set you back £150, but even in RAID, they're unlikely to offer this sort of performance. So it comes down to this: how many hard drive bays do you have, and how deep are your pockets?