You might not have realised it, but Hitachi did get its 7K1000 1TB hard drive out of the door during the first quarter of 2007, as it promised to do when it launched the product. But it admitted the product had not reached "critical mass" until this month.

Indeed, of the online retailers we checked with today - all of whom list the drive among the products on offer - none actually had any to sell. However, US supplier CDW, which Hitachi claimed was "among the first organisations to make the terabyte hard drive available to customers", did indeed have the products on offer, though the drive won't ship for 4-6 days.

Whatever, the 3.5in monster-capacity hard drive incorporates 32MB of cache memory, spins a 7,200rpm and contains five platters and ten read/write heads. Hitachi is also offering a 750GB version. Both connect using 3Gbps Serial ATA.

Dell and its Alienware subsidiary last month became the first vendors to offer the drive as a build-to-order component on their gaming systems.