BTW -- I find it disturbing how many people referring to the difference between STATED capacity and ACTUAL capacity a "lie." It's NOT a lie. In fact, I've yet to get a hard drive whose documentation (or even box) doesn't disclaim that the actual capacity can vary.
The fact is, no matter what, a hard drive is NOT going to have exactly the capacity advertised. Are they lying? No...if it says 120 GB, then...it really IS 120 GB...raw, before any kind of formatting and partitioning. Partitioning takes up space. Formatting takes even more space. And the bigger the advertised size, the bigger the difference between advertised and actual size. Also, all drives have "bad" blocks that, for whatever reason, are unusable, so that too will take away from the size.
And of course, CAN they sell drives with an accurate capacity advertised? Nope: depends on how it's partitioned and how it's formatted. And how many blocks on the medium go bad.
And you know what? Same thing happened with floppy disks, too. And because their storage capacities were so small, you pretty much got the same exact sizes after formatting: Microsoft-formatted DSHD disks had 1.44MB while DSDD had 720kb; Mac-formatted DSHD disks had 1.6MB, while DSDD had 800kb; Amiga-formatted DSHD had 1.76MB, DSDD had 880kb. But the packaging often said "1MB" for capacity for DSDD, "2MB" for DSHD -- because that's how much storage space was built into the medium; what you actually got depended on how the disk was formatted.
