Some exciting news in the storage realm this week.

First up is Hitachi. As you know, hard drive capacity is hurtling past the 1 terabyte mark, which is great if you need more storage space but not so great if you need to secure it, greenly. No worries, says Hitachi. The company's new 1TB drive offers built-in hardware encryption and is Energy Star compliant.

InternetNews reports:

Responding to customer demand for big storage that's more energy efficient and secure, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies today announced its next generation of 1 terabyte hard drives, which offer data encryption in a more compact form factor.

Hitachi GST's Deskstar 7K1000.B product line features a three-disk design that requires less power and cooling. In addition, it has an optional security feature, Bulk Data Encryption, based on the Advanced Encryption Standard certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In the SSD realm, it looks like Samsung isn't about to let OCZ hog the 128GB spotlight unchallenged.

The company today said it has started mass producing competitive drives using MLC NAND technology. No word on price yet. They describe the cost as "attractive" but we'll just have to wait and see...