1,000 GB hard drive will appear in the first quarter of 2007

US storage device maker Seagate said the move to orthogonal recording technology has helped them take a big step in increasing hard drive capacity. Meanwhile, Hitachi announced it was the first company to reach the 1 terabyte (TB) mark.

Seagate's 1 TB drive price, expected to be available in mid-2007, has yet to be announced. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 drive will ship soon in the first quarter of this year for $ 399 - lower than buying two 500 GB hard drives. Deskstar will also be introduced at CES 2007 consumer electronics exhibition, taking place in Las Vegas next week.

Seagate and Hitachi products are both developed on orthogonal methods (PRM). Similar to the technology in most current hard drives, PRM uses magnetic molecules to store data. However, in the method of horizontal, north and south polarity of the molecule lying parallel to the surface of the disk, in PRM technology, they lie vertically compared to the disk. This helps increase the number of molecules because they occupy less surface area.