Hitachi, after Seagate, is one of the few companies offering drives that support perpendicular recording. Just recently, they announced that they had shipped over one million perpendicular drives, and say they plan to ship four million or more by the end of this year:
"The transition to perpendicular recording technology is essential for continued growth of the hard drive industry, which is why Hitachi invested significant time and resources to achieve a solid product in the Travelstar 5K160," said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
While a very useful technology, and one that hasn't seemed to raise the cost of disks much on the consumer level, very few vendors seem to be actively pushing these drives. Even in laptops, where the drives are most likely to be found, they don't seem to be getting much attention. This is a shame, because after having used several of these drives myself I can safely say there is a noticeable speed improvement without having to ramp up spindle speed or add more expensive cache.