For the storage-conscious geeks, this may be a dream come true: Japanese computer hardware company Hitachi Ltd succeeded in shrinking one of the basic, important parts in a hard drive, enabling them to increase desktop HD storage capacity amounting to four terabytes. It should be noted that they made an announcement last year that they would manufacture 1TB hard drives by the end of 2006.

One terabyte alone isn't anything to scoff at. Imagine a one terabyte iPod: that's about 250,000 songs, or even 250 hours of high-definition video on the go.

Hitachi said that consumers may look forward to getting devices with 1TB storage by 2011. It's quite a long wait, and considering how fast technology advances we may need even more storage space than what we do right now. There's the storage-consuming high-definition video content, for example.

The storage capacity-increasing technology involves the use of magnetoresistance, which was discovered by two European scientists and consequently won the Nobel Prize in physics.

Hitachi plans to introduce the new technology in Tokyo's Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference.