Seagate Technology is planning to begin shipping a hard-disk drive with a 1T-byte storage capacity sometime during the first half of 2007, it said Thursday. The drive, which will offer one-third more space than Seagate’s current highest-capacity drive, is expected to ship to major customers like system and PC vendors during that time-frame, Seagate said.

The switch to a new data recording technology called perpendicular recording is the key to enabling some big jumps in storage capacity on hard-disk drives.

The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used until recently in most drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. In longitudinal drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disk, but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disk. The result of this new arrangement is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk’s surface and so more particles can be crammed onto the disk.

Seagate’s current 750G-byte drive and the planned 1T-byte drive are based on perpendicular recording.