Offering a gigabyte to pound ratio that's quite staggering (working out around 67p at the time of writing), the Samsung Spinpoint F1 SATA2 drive is a 1TB hard disk drive that's going to prove tempting to anyone with a PC jam-packed full of media files. To get so much into a tight price tag, the spin speed has been kept at 7,200rpm, but we found in our tests that Samsung's drive was still capable of some impressive performance.

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The drive itself comes with SATA connections only, supporting SATA-300, and it took a matter of a minute to get it installed on our test rig. We added it as a secondary hard drive and our Vista installation didn't immediately recognise it. Again, though, a minute or so in Disk Management and we were ready to roll.

As you'd expect, the drive takes some time to do a full format and we got ours in place and NTFS-formatted as we put it to the test. HD Tach reported an impressive burst speed of 231.4MB/s, which sat very well against the 134.5MB/s of the 400GB Western Digital WD4000KD that was in the same machine.