We’ve heard some whisperings that Seagate has a 500GB hard drive of their own in the hopper, but Hitachi announced yesterday that they’re coming out with a 500GB 3.5-inch desktop PC hard drive. The other news is that they’ve shrunk their 1-inch MicroDrive so that it takes up one-fifth less space and more than doubled it’s capacity to 10GB (there’s also an 8GB version, too). If you want to connect the dots, Apple uses Hitachi’s 4GB 1-inch MicroDrive in the iPod mini, so it’s not entirely inconceivable that an 8GB or 10GB iPod mini could turn up sometime this year.