Hitachi will ship its latest 3.5in desktop hard disk drives in Q3, the company said yesterday. The new units will feature the company's latest, 160GB-plus, 1.2bn bits per square inch density platters allowing it to deliver 500GB of storage capacity using just three disks, reducing drive complexity and power consumption.

The Deskstar T7K500 and 7K160 will both contain platters spinning at 7,200rpm and connect to the outside world via at least 8MB - 16MB on some models - of cache memory and across a 3Gbps Serial ATA bus with native command queuing (NCQ). They offer an 8.5ms average seek time and a 4.17ms average latency.