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Hitachi's division of storage technologies, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, is expected to announce they will begin selling 1-terabyte desktop drives later this year.

In order to increase storage capacities, HGST is employing perpendicular recording, which Macworld describes as:

Perpendicular recording is perhaps the most significant near-term step in the evolution of hard-disk drive technology. The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used in today's drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. In today's drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disc but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disc, as the name suggests.

The result of this new arrangement is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk's surface and so more particles can be crammed onto the disk. This is measured as the areal density and today's most advanced drives can store between 100Gb (gigabits) and 120Gb of data in a square inch of disk space.

With this method, HGST envisions storage capacities of 230Gb per square inch by 2007. This technology would also enable the 1TB, 3.5-inch drive and 20GB, 1-inch drive. Hitachi is expected to officially announce their intentions later today.

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