Hitachi offers world's first 1Tb hard disk

£205 device packs 148 billion bits per square inch

Hitachi is to launch two world-first 1Terabyte drives at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.

The Deskstar 7K1000 will ship early this year at a US price of $399 (£205); no price, specifications or availability was announced for its sibling CinemaStar K1000 drive which is optimised for streaming video.

An enterprise-class 1Tbyte drive is also being evaluated.The Deskstar price works out at very low 20p per gigabyte. Hitachi's storage division says says the new drives will enable home PCs to cope with the storage demands of high-definition video.

Relatively low-cost terabyte drives have been available for a couple of years, but they have consisted of arrays of smaller capacity disks.

The 3.5in, 7200rpm 7K1000 has five platters packing up to 148 billion bits of data per square inch, with ten heads. A four-platter 750GByte with eight heads will ship at the same time.

Data can be read off the platters into the drive's 32MB buffer at a maximum 1070Mbyte/sec (media data rate) and there is the choice Serial and parallel ATA interfaces.

*Watch out for Rob Jones's reports and blog from CES next week.