Hard drive manufacturers: bite me

Dear hard drive manufacturers of the world:

When will you stop lying to everyone?

Case in point: I just bought a 320 GB hard drive to replace the 120 GB one in my computer.

This is what I get when I plug it in:



Hmm, that new hard drive certainly isn't 320GB. In what bizarro universe does 297=320?

What about that 500 GB external hard drive I got last month? Nope, 465.

465=500? I love this math! I'm cutting my car payment and rent checks by 8-odd percent, post-haste!

Yes, I realize the technical cause of this: I know that a "bit" does not equal a "byte." Thus, the formatted drive is not as large as advertised. So what?! That's my point!

"But it IS 500 GB when it's not formatted for use..." I KNOW! That's not an excuse, that's mealy-mouthed technical gobbledy-gook. What good is an unformatted drive? It's useless, that's how good.

When your box says 500 GB in 144 pt 72 pt bold slab-serif, I think I could be forgiven for expecting it to hold 500 Giga-something-usefuls!


That damn pesky evidence

How long until we, as customers, finally call hard drive manufacturers on their lies? When everyone plugs in their first shiny 1000 GB drive to discover it only holds 920? That's a entire placeholder digit you've been robbed of!

It's a set percentage that you're losing every time, so it's only going to keep looking worse as drives get larger, gang.

(Side note: why, after 30 years, do we still not have one single hard drive format that works flawlessly on both a Mac and a Windows PC? Did someone not think that'd be useful?)

Is there any other product that can get away with this? Boxes of cereal and bags of chips come to mind, with their "Contents may have settled" (read: the bag is half empty) warnings.

Am I off my rocker? Is this not a big deal? Any other products that instantly become 8% less useful as soon as you want to use them? Let me know in the comments.

Another aside: I feel a little remorseful about using a picture of a Seagate drive box, because, discounting the capacity lie, their packaging is refreshing and, frankly, delightful. Scan their boxes when you're at the store next time. And check out their instruction manual:

Get ready for lazy economic theory

Amazon.com was down today for anywhere from one to three hours, depending on who you ask.

I love Amazon, and I'm making an early prediction here: some journalist or blogger is going to look at their financials and blusteringly announce that the outage cost Amazon.com so many thousands of dollars per minute.

Their math? Take quarterly revenues. Divide by time. Done.

The problem?

I'm John Q. Internet Shopper. I want to buy a book on Amazon.

Oh, rats, Amazon is down. That's rare.

Do I decide I no longer want a book and never shop at Amazon again?

Or do I wait a few hours and try again later?

Then spend the money I was planning on spending anyway.

Net loss to Amazon? $0.

They might have lost a few impatient types that hopped over to Barnes and Noble or something, but I bet Amazon is going to come out of this ok.

You see this same logical fallacy in those chain letters about not buying gas on whatever day. That'll show the dastardly oil companies! ... until the next day when everybody buys the gas they would have bought anyway. Whoops.

Update 7:50 6/6/08: The Consumerist bit. They're saying about $17,000 per minute "lost." In fairness, the 120th or so commenter calls shennanigans on their math.

Update 7:52 6/6/08: I'm going to call this sort of thing 'retardnomics,' in honor of the chain letter analogy. I slay me.