Dell and Alienware have introduced Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' 1TB hard drive as an option for consumers who want to buy a desktop system from the XPS, Aurora and Area-51 series of desktops. The previous offer regarding storage was Seagate's 750GB hard drive, now the second largest hard drive in these companies' offer.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive chosen has some pretty nifty features including, besides the outrageous storage capacity of 1TB, the 32MB of buffer memory, unlike the 16MB previously encountered at other hard drives. It has a Serial ATA 3Gb/s interface, 7200RPMs, five platters and ten heads, with a 4.17ms average latency, a power consumption level of 4.5-13.6W, depending of usage, while withstanding an operating temperature of 5-60�C.

"Digital content use is exploding in the consumer market - with this 1TB hard drive, a lifetime of memories, music and other information can be made, stored and shared with others. 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" stated Neil Hand, vice president, worldwide consumer marketing consumer product group, Dell.

The hard drive uses the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology for data storage, allowing it to achieve up to ten times more information to be stored than by using Longitudinal Magnetic Recording. The same technology is also used by Seagate, Fujitsu Limited and Toshiba on their hard drives. By using a 1TB hard drive on their systems, Alienware have added a 50$ price tag from choosing this hard drive over the 750GB from Seagate. That's a cool 5 bucks per gigabyte, not bad.