SAN JOSE, Calif. — Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced its first terabyte drive on Friday (Jan. 5).

Hitachi's achievement of packing a terabyte in a 3.5-inch hard drive is part of the industry's broader shift to perpendicular from longitudinal recording. That generational change is proceeding well for most players, with market leader Seagate Technology well ahead of the pack and expected to leapfrog Hitachi's announcement soon.

Hitachi's terabyte drives are the company's first 3.5-inch drives to use perpendicular recording. It initially applied the new recording technique to the 2.5-inch notebook drives that are its bread and butter.

The company will ship a retail model of the terabyte drive for $399 before April. Still in testing are a consumer version for digital video recorders (DVRs) and an enterprise version for storage arrays that use most of today's high-capacity drives. Both are set to ship by June.

"There's a broad reach for this product," said Doug Pickford, director market and product strategy at Hitachi GST, based here.

While Hitachi claims a lead in hitting the terabyte milestone, its dirty little secret is it is using five platters. Hitachi also used five platters in the first rev of its previous high-end drive, a 500-Gbyte model. Hitachi later shrunk the 500 Gbyte drive to just three platters.