Terabytes Ahoy: a big day for storage!

Today, we hit the triple jackpot on three big storage advances.

First: Hitachi has shipped the first terabyte 3.5-inch hard drive — only five months after my colleague Andrew Binstock predicted that one would go onto the market. The Deskstar 7K1000 is a 7200rpm drive with 4.17ms latency and 8.5ms seek time, according to Hitachi. The price at Computer Discount Warehouse is US$444.99. I want one.

Second: Dell has offered what I believe to be the first mainstream notebook PC using a solid-state drive as its main storage. You can order the Latitude D420 (a 3.0 pound machine) with a 60GB rotating drive, an 80GB rotating drive, or a 32GB SSD. The SSD option costs $450 more than the default 60GB rotating drive. According to Dell, choosing the SSD option may delay shipment by five days.

Third: Samsung is now offering a 120GB hard drive in the 1.8″ form factor used by devices like the Apple iPod. Seagate also offers an 1.8″ drive in that capacity, but still, it’s exciting.