HDD's - the Advertized size vs the Actual size.

I called it an advertising lie. Like claiming that your product is "most powerful" when 5 competitors are all exactly the same power because the law is you can;t make it any more powerful (Asperin is a great example). I't s technically correct, they are all the "most powerful" and also the "least powerful", but is extremely misleading.

The courts decided that the CRT measurements were misleading enough to legislate it. If someone had brought this to suit the same thing would surely have happened.

[Edit] Oh heh yeah "Broadband" boy is that ever a marketing term with no proper definition (well not in the marketing world anyway) [/edit]

sunnybyfleet said:

The odd gigabyte here and there doesn't seem in the same league.

When shopping around recently, 500GB seems to be fairly standard for a home PC ready built and sold in a PC shop or similar today. In my opinion, anyone unaware of the computers power of 2 counting system would probably consider losing 35GB to be a fair amount. For a home user, that's Microsoft Office, a hell of a lot of documents and a hell of a lot of pictures.

They're unlikely to ever need the extra 35GB, but advertising it then not giving it is a lot to the average home user, in my opinion.

So perhaps sizes should be quoted in bytes? Problem goes away then.

Or perhaps, if a hard disk is advertised at £100, we should actually pay £102.40 for it?

sunnybyfleet said:

So perhaps sizes should be quoted in bytes? Problem goes away then.

Or perhaps, if a hard disk is advertised at £100, we should actually pay £102.40 for it?

Hahaha, that's a great suggestion but if they want to keep the decimal gig values then if a "500 gig" drive costs $100 but is only 488 Gig in reality then we should only have to pay 97.60 for it

Would be hilarious to do if you actually bought the drives from the manufacturer directly just to make a point

Well the HDs advertising/box art generally contains a disclaimer about "Formatted size will be smaller". THough in reality that accounts for only part of the loss. The GB/GiB issue accounts for quite a bit more.

But with that formsat warning in place it probably covers enough ass to have slipped under the legal sharks attention :)

Thank you very much, but does it go along with the external ones.