Well, we knew it was likely to happen in 2006 or 2007:Hitachi has broken the 1TB drive barrier with the introduction of the new Deskstar 7K1000 drive. Thanks to perpendicular recording and the average consumers' voracious appetite for more data storage, Hitachi's new R3800 drives -- available in SATA II or PATA 133 varieties, with differing speed modes, a 32MB buffer, quieting accoustics, SMART, and a 7200rpm spindle speed -- will hit the market running in Q1 of this year. Also announced: the CinemaStar 7K1000, a DVR-centric drive due in Q2 which wasn't fully detailed, but apparently has "adaptive error recovery", "Smooth Stream Technology to optimize the drive for audio/video applications requiring reliable storage", and other buzzy sounding stuff which just seems a lot like regular old drive features. We'll assume it's better tuned for high-throughput read / write performance, and leave it at that.

We're hoping to see higher TB drives in the next few years. Maybe a 2TB drive, anyone?