Dell this week announced that it will be the first manufacturer in the industry to start shipping computers with the first consumer 1 terabyte (TB) hard drive. Using the Deskstar 7K1000 drive from Hitachi, Dell will begin including the new drives in both its own line of XPS gaming systems and under the Alienware brand. Alienware Aurora and Area 51 systems will be receiving the new 1TB drives first.

According to official Hitachi specifications, the new drive is a Serial ATA 3Gbps model with a 7200 RPM spindle rate. Read time comes in at 8.5ms and write times at 9.2ms. With data densities this high, previous studies have found that data integrity may be compromised. Perpendicular hard drives will become more mainstream as capacities increase. Using perpendicular recording methods, data integrity remains high even at record breaking storage capacities.

Along with the new 1TB drive, Dell is launching a service called StudioDell, which the company calls a "video time capsule." StudioDell will allow subscribers to upload videos, which will be stored at Dell headquarters for 50 years, so that later generations may view them. Dell even indicated that the videos will be stored on the new 1TB drives from Hitachi.

Neil Hand, vice president for Dell's worldwide consumer marketing division said in a statement that high quality media such as HD video is becoming mainstream, making larger hard drive capacities all the more necessary. “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,” said Hand.