Hitachi Announces 1 TB Desktop Drive Range

As CES approaches there is going to be a rush of surprise super-releases for the PC markets. First it was the HD DVD drive from Toshiba and now in a move that was inevitable, Hitachi has announced the storage industry’s first Terabyte series of drives.

These new monster capacity drives will ship in two variants, one the Deskstar 7K1000, which is aimed at the general mainstream market and the CinemaStar 7K1000 which is aimed towards the Digital Video Recording and HD Content market. Both the drives will be 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM Parallel-ATA/Serial-ATA hard drives and will feature Perpendicular magnetic recording for their storage technology. Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 will begin shipping to retail customers in the first quarter of 2007 at a suggested retail price of $399 (USD), or 40 cents per gigabyte (GB).

“The industry’s first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making, and it reasserts the hard drive’s leadership as the highest-capacity, lowest-cost storage technology,” said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “In the 51st year, Hitachi is leading a new era for hard drives — not only providing large amounts of affordable storage, but also customizing and optimizing hard drives to deliver products that are smarter, more durable and more useful to the consumer.”

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Watch this space. As CES, draws closer expect other manufacturers to also announce 1 TB drives.