Just as CPU frequencies ramp up on a regular basis, so does the humble hard disk drive capacity, now sitting comfortably around the 80GB mark on average. But for those users after goliath capacity drives with fast seek and access times, there's the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus. Weighing in at a whopping 200GB, this drive is perfect for large file archiving or would be brilliant either standalone, or as part of a DV RAID array. An 8MB cache also aids performance by temporarily  buffering recently accessed data, keeping the flow smooth while the disk is accessed.

Using Diskspeed32, we were able to plot a graphical representation of read speed, the Seagate producing an average access time of 15.1ms, hardly a slouch when it comes to the number crunching.

Unfortunately, the drive is not SATA, and uses the old IDE PATA connector, but this makes it a good upgrade option for legacy machines.

The 7200.7's reasonable price tag and high capacity makes it perfect for archiving on a shoe-string budget.