Hitachi to sell world's first 1 TB hard drive

Global storage technology firm Hitachi has announced that it is to sell the world's first one terabyte (TB) – equivalent to1,000 gigabytes - hard disk drive within three months.

The Deskstar 7K1000 will be just 3.5 inches in diameter and will cost $399 in what is the first hard disk of such a size to be made available for general use.

As downloading videos, pictures and programs becomes more of a feature of every day life, the pressure on computers' hard drives is growing; the world's first one gigabyte (GB) drive was released 14 years ago, while the first 500 GB drive came out just two years ago.

The very first hard drive was built in 1956, weighed a ton and held just five megabytes of data.

"The industry's first 1 TB 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.

The drive will be featured at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this weekend, where Bill Gates has been secured as a keynote speaker.