It was bound to happen sooner or later, and now here it is. Seagate is announcing what will be the first 1 Terabyte desktop hard drive. Unless some of the other companies have something in the works they aren't revealing, Seagate will be the first to market with this absolutely behemoth capacity disk, which will employ perpendicular recording. If you've purchased a laptop HDD that uses perpendicular recording, you may have already noticed the speed boost it brings, even when spindle speeds are the same. Now, it gets put to another test:

Seagate's 1TB hard drive will be our second generation 3.5-inch hard drive to feature capacity-boosting perpendicular recording technology, and it will use fewer heads and discs than similar-capacity products we expect to see from our competitors. It is clear that fewer heads and discs, along with our proven perpendicular technology, can increase drive reliability, and also reduce operating temperatures, power consumption, noise, and weight.
Supposedly the drive will be ready in the first half of this year. Considering that no other company has even yet produced a 750GB unit, I doubt Seagate will be bested in this.