PC maker Dell claims to be the first to ship 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) hard drive.

 
The drives, which are targeted at users needing to store large amounts of digital media, are aimed mostly at those wanting to store video content, such as high-definition video.

 
It is a change in policy for Dell which normally ships higher-capacity disk drives to businesses first.

 
ARNNet quoted Dell vice president, Neil Hand as saying that this type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations. "With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we're now able to bring it to consumers," he said.

 
The first Dell PCs to use the drives will be the new Alienware-branded gaming PCs. XPS systems will then follow suit.

 
The drives are Hitachi GST's 1TB Deskstar 7K1000. They can spin at 7,200 rpm with a 3GBit/s serial ATA interface. The drive uses perpendicular recording, has five platters, a read access time of 8.5msecs and a write time of 9.2msecs. It has a cache of 32MB and an 8.7ms average seek time. They will sell for US$540.

 
More here.