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]<p>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.<p>[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.