If you were excited when Hitachi came out with the first 1TB internal hard drive early last year then be prepared to be just slightly more excited. Hitachi today introduced that same 1TB Deskstar drive but now using 43% less power consumption, naming it the Deskstar 7K1000.B.

The “.B” means that you can buy this whopping internal hard drive with less concern that it’s going to sit there and suck loads more power than your old 80GB drive, which it will, but not as much as it used to according to Hitachi. The drive is actually available in sizes from 160GB up to the largest 1TB capacity.

Hitachi has announced a new Blu-ray burner that can create discs from the latest camcorders with eSATA ports. The DZ-WR90 plugs straight into the camcorder and automatically creates discs from the footage that you select. So, you don’t need a computer. It even finalises the discs automatically, making it an easy complete one-step process.

The drive will also work with DVD-R discs, and even supports double-sided media as long as you’re willing to flip them yourself. They’re claiming that a Blu-ray disc will fit around three hours of full 1920 × 1080 footage and burn in 1.5hrs; or up to six hours in 1440 × 1080 resolution. A DVD can store up to one hour of 720 × 480 footage. This should make it easy for anyone who wants a simple way to share their video.

Today Hitachi has announced that it will be the industries first in the world to offer a 1 terabyte hard drive. The 1,000 GB drive (for those having trouble with the metric system) will be available to retail consumers in the first quarter of this year, and will come under the name ‘Deskstar 7K1000′ retailing for $399. Hitachi states that the 40 cents per gig (for those having trouble with the math) will make the larger capacity an accessible price for more customers.

This announcement comes within hours of Seagate’s announcement of also offering a 1 TB drive sometime during the first half of this year. Seagate did not have specifics as to a release time or price and since missed out on the race to be the first.

“The industry’s first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is …