Hard disk drive (HDD) maker Hitachi Global Storage Technologies said in an interview that the world’s first 1TB hard drive would be unveiled as early as by the end of the year. While the company did not say directly that it would unleash the giant storage device, it could be expected, as Hitachi needs to grab the technology leadership crown from Seagate Technologies

“Desktop hard drives holding 1 terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of storage will likely be announced in 2006,” said Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, reports Cnet News.com.

The Hitachi executive indicated that the 1TB hard disk drives will come in 3.5” form-factor and will fit into typical personal computers. But Mr. Healy did not say whether his company, or Seagate Technologies will be the first to unveil the 1TB storage device.

Currently Hitachi and Western Digital ship up to 500MB HDDs, while Seagate has up to 750GB hard drives in its product range. Both Hitachi and Seagate aggressively employ perpendicular recording technology to increase capacities of their storage solutions for consumers, but the yields of the media used in such devices is not as high as that of traditional media. Seagate is the world’s largest maker of HDDs and it can sacrifice yields for technology crown, but Hitachi may still want to grab the technology leadership to fight against WD, the world’s second largest maker of hard drives, who may be planning up to 640GB models.

Even though makers of storage solutions compete for the capacities and for the reliability of their products, the majority of customers need latter much more than the former. Very few enthusiasts of multimedia need 1TB of data to be held on their computers.