Love the battle of the firsts and why should computer storage not leverage key features when one company has them and no one else does.

Well, today we have two separate reports -- one about Seagate and the other about Hitachi -- hitting the magical 1TB milestone for storing data on a hard disk drive for consumer use.

You can check out the speeds and feeds on both drives, but no matter how you slice it, 1TB of data is a heck of a lot of data to store.

Remember when 1GB seemed like more storage than anyone could possibly use?

These drives are using perpendicular technology, which I wrote about two years ago.

(P.S. Calling all Geeks! Check out the cool Perpendicular T-Shirt)

And I just had to include the Perpendicular song.

(To view the animation you will need the Macromedia Flash plug in.)

Let's see what other storage news comes out in the next week or so -- the CES show next week should be revealing ...