"This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations,” understated Neil Hand, VP at Dell VP.

“With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we are now able to bring it to consumers."

It’s a massive amount of storage – equating to 250,000 MP3s or one eighth of the catalogue from the iTunes store. It could hold 1,250 hours of video.

Dell’s Alienware games PCs will be the first to sport the massive drives, with the computer manufacturer’s XPS range of PCs following soon after.

The 1TB drives will sell for $540 (£275), which works out around 28p per gigabyte.