LAS VEGAS, NV – To accommodate consumer demand for ever-larger amounts of digital storage space, hard disk drive manufacturers Hitachi Ltd. and Seagate Technologies both announced Sunday the development of enormous new drives that they will soon introduce in consumer devices.Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc., has unveiled a record-breaking hard drive with full terabyte – that’s 1,000 gigabytes – of capacity. In a press release issued Monday, Hitachi did not set a solid drop date for the new drives becoming available, stating only that the Deskstar 7K1000 will “begin shipping to retail customers in the first quarter of 2007.”

According to the release, the Deskstar 7K1000 will sell for a suggested retail price of $399 US, or around 40 cents per gigabyte.

“This new consumer-friendly price makes ultra-high storage capacity more affordable and accessible than ever before,” Hitachi states in its release.

“The industry’s first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making, and it reasserts the hard drive’s leadership as the highest-capacity, lowest-cost storage technology,” said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, in the press release. “In the 51st year, Hitachi is leading a new era for hard drives – not only providing large amounts of affordable storage, but also customizing and optimizing hard drives to deliver products that are smarter, more durable and more useful to the consumer.”

Seagate did not provide pricing detail for its upcoming high-capacity products, but announced that it will release a variety of new storage systems to allow users to back up data online, as well as on drives attached to their home PCs. Seagate’s largest drive announced thus far will hold up to 750 gigabytes of data – that’s 250GB short of Hitachi’s biggest drive, but substantially larger than the 500GB drives that are currently the largest on the market.

Seagate said its new line of storage products will become available starting next month, and the product line will include a storage system that allows users to store up to 500 megabytes of data via the Web, which they can then access from any computer if away from their home desktop.

In addition to the Deskstar 7K1000, Hitachi also announced a “CinemaStar” version with a one terabyte drive, which the company says “provides optimized capabilities specifically designed for digital video recording (DVR) applications.”

“Consumers who increasingly rely on hard disk drives to store their digital memories are seeking higher capacity and more reliable HDDs,” said John Rydning, research manager for hard disk drives at IDC, in the Hitachi press release. “Reaching 1 TB of capacity in a disk drive is a testament to 50 years of innovation by the hard disk drive industry, and helps to ensure sufficient storage capacity is available to meet increasing consumer storage requirements.”

Hitachi and Seagate announced their high-capacity drives in coordination with the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which officially kicked off Sunday night with a speech from Microsoft head honcho Bill Gates.