I bought an external hard drive today, the internal 40Gb was simply too small for my music collection and everything else I was used to having on the Mac's 60Gb drive. I have kept the internal and got a cheap Western Digital Elements drive at 160Gb for £49, only it's er.... not 160Gb.
Unfortunately this is nothing new in the market, disk manufacturers have been rounding up capacities for many years.
Take the 1980s for example. The Double-Density floppy disk advertised having a whopping 720k storage at the time, but actually DOS systems could only access 713k of it. The Amiga was not whiter than white either, with its standard 880k disks only usually containing 837k of space.
The so-called 40Gb hard disk in my box is actually only 33, and today I discovered the 160Gb drive I just purchased is actually only 149Gb. This is ridiculous.
This isn't a few megabytes of difference, it is a whopping 11 gigabytes less than advertised. Enough for a fully configured OS install and a fat wad of applications and some MP3s thrown in. A lot of space.
Now if it was 159Gb then that would be understandable, marketing a "160Gb" drive makes more sense. It would also be understandable if they marketed my drive as having a "150Gb" capacity.
I think manufacturers need to be more honest and stop this before eventually we will be seeing 1Tb drives with only around 800Gb of actual storage space.
Being the modest honest guy I am, when people ask me the capacity of the drive, I will say 150Gb. It's a shame manufacturers can't apply the same honesty.
