Hitachi's storage division has launched what it claims is the world's first one terabyte 3.5 inch disk drive.
The Deskstar 7K1000 will begin shipping in the first quarter of this year. The suggested retail price of the new disk is $399 (203), which works out at around 20 pence per gigabyte (GB).
Alongside the Deskstar, Hitachi is also launching a CinemaStar version 1TB hard drive aimed at the digital video recorder market. These disk drives have the capability to store 250 hours of high-definition television. This disk will be available in the second quarter of this year.
The 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM hard drives use perpendicular magnetic recording technology, first seen on Hitachi's Travelstar 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch disks. The drives will be available in SATA 3.0Gb/s and PATA-133 interface version.
John Rydning, research manager for hard disk drives at analysts IDC said that reaching 1 TB of capacity in a disk drive "is a testament to 50 years of innovation by the hard disk drive industry, and helps to ensure sufficient storage capacity is available to meet increasing consumer storage requirements."
