Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), a leading manufacturer of hard disk drives, has announced the world’s first desktop hard disk drive with 1TB capacity, which will ship this quarter. The novelty hits “psychological” milestone of 1000GB and demonstrates nearly 60 times increase in 3.5” hard drive capacity throughout the most recent decade.

“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.

Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 lineup will include 4-platter model with 750GB capacity and 5-platter flavour with 1000GB (1TB capacity). The Deskstar 7K1000 has 7200rpm motor, 32MB data buffer and utilizes Serial ATA-300 interface. The manufacturer claims that the drives have 8.7ms average seek time and 1070Mb/s maximum media data rate.

Just a little bit less than a decade ago – in 1997 – the highest capacity of hard disk drives was 16.8GB offered by IBM’s Deskstar 16GP Titan, which also had five 3.5” platters. Back in 2003 IBM sold its storage division to Hitachi, which formed Hitachi GST company.

Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 will begin shipping to retail customers in the first quarter of 2007 at a suggested retail price of $399, or $0.4 per gigabyte (GB). In addition, Hitachi will ship CinemaStar version 1TB hard drive, which provides optimized capabilities specifically designed for digital video recording (DVR) applications.

“Consumers who increasingly rely on hard disk drives to store their digital memories are seeking higher capacity and more reliable HDDs,” said John Rydning, research manager for hard disk drives at IDC. “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”.