The trend of "drive unit advertises unrealistic capacity" seems to be unique to flash memory. It's interesting that there wasn't very much of this in the spinn

The trend of "drive unit advertises unrealistic capacity" seems to be unique to flash memory. It's interesting that there wasn't very much of this in the spinning rust days[1] I wonder if part of it is that SSDs and flash drives are much more of a DIY venture-- you can buy the controller and flash through normal supply chains. If you wanted to create a bogus "200Mb" hard drive out of a 40Mb unit, you either had to buy a bunch of completed 40Mb drives and hack the firmware, or at least secure a bunch of 40Mb HDAs to attach to your custom lying PCB. [1] The obvious exception I can see is the early days of MFM/RLL drives, where you could bump a drive by 50% capacity by pairing it with an RLL controller, even if the manufacturer had not qualified it for RLL.