Hitachi's Global Storage Technologies division has finally begun shipping its latest 3.5in hard drives, some six months after the Deskstar and CinemaStar models were originally anounced.

The Deskstar T7K500 is available in capacities from 250GB to 500GB. The drives are available with either an ATA-133 or a 3Gbps Serial ATA connection, with 8MB or 16MB of buffer memory. Hitachi quoted an average seek time of 8.5ms.

That figure applies to the Deskstar 7K160, which ships in 80GB and 160GB capacities. Like the T7K500, it's a 7,200rpm unit, again offering a choice of interfaces, but only 8MB of cache.

Ditto the CinemaStar 7K160 and 7K500 lines. They match their Deskstar equivalents in all but seek time: 14ms in the case of the consumer electronics oriented lines. ®