There's a similar story about Soviet hard drives. See, the early hard drives used in Soviet computers required a lot of manual maintenance, which included clea

There's a similar story about Soviet hard drives. See, the early hard drives used in Soviet computers required a lot of manual maintenance, which included cleaning the heads with ethanol. They also topped out at ~5Mb. In late 80s these were gradually replaced with imported Western hardware that offered more storage for less. In some places, the engineers in charge of servicing those things got creative and used such upgrades as an excuse to up their ethanol quota. After all, if a 5Mb HDD needs N ml of ethanol to service daily, it stands to reason that a 20Mb HDD needs N*4, right?