A day after the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate Technology announced its plans to ship the first 1-terabyte hard drive in the first half of 2007, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies on Friday announced the launch of industry's first terabyte (TB) hard drive for desktopts, intended to deliver superior performance, reliability and capacity as well.

Hitachi GST said it would demonstrate the 1-Tbyte Deskstar 7K1000 drive at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, due next week.

Headquartered in San Jose, California-Hitachi GST will begin shipment of 1TB hard drive to retail customers in the first quarter of 2007 at a suggested retail price of US$399, or 40 cents per gigabyte (GB).

With ultra-high storage capacity, the 3.5in, 7200 RPM Parallel-ATA/Serial-ATA hard drive would boost consumers’ ability to store video, photos, music and other valued data to new heights.

The drive uses perpendicular magnetic recording technology to enhance storage capacity and has SATA 2.0Gbps and PATA-133 interfaces plus "ramp load" design to make the drive more power-efficient, Hitachi said.

"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 for Hitachi GST.

According to Hitachi, a 1-Tbyte drive can hold text of approximately 1 million books, 333,000 digital images, 250 hours of high-definition movies, 1,000 hours of standard-definition video or 250,000 MP3 songs.

The Deskstar 7K1000 SATA version will be available at 750-GB and one-TB capacities. Hitachi also plans to introduce a similar drive for enterprise environments in the second quarter.

Together with the Deskstar 7K1000 for the retail market, Hitachi also announced a 3.5-inch TB drive for digital video recorder. The hard drive, dubbed CinemaStar version 1TB, provides optimized capabilities especially designed for digital video recording (DVR) applications. Equipped with Audio-Visual Storage Manager software, the drive makes the navigation simple.

The CinemaStar 1TB hard drive will hit the market in the second quarter.

Terabyte drives from the two of the biggest hard-disk drive makers, Seagate Technology and Hitachi come at the time when the people around the world have been connecting digitally.

Consumers have entered an era where they can capture everything on digital still or video, and can save those content to listen or share in future. For this purpose, they need ultra large capacity drives and 1TB drives meet such requirements.