PC world will sell laptops come with a "massive" 40gb Hard drive and a huge 1gb of RAM

Of course it's a "massive" 40gb drive - just about everything in the universe is massive... the definition being: "has mass"

So... a "massive" hard drive just means it has a real hard drive, not one of those imaginary ones that the competitors sell!

A "huge 1gb of RAM" ... does that mean it uses desktop form-factor memory, rather than laptop? Hence the larger size??

decision: buy new laptop that takes larger drive......or buy an external drive.....

thats an easy one.

It's 12.5mm deep, meaning that my dreams of having a half-terabyte drive in my laptop have been well and truly shafted :-( Ah well, looks like I'll have to settle for 320Gb, unless someone has a 9.5mm, 500Gb drive in the pipeline (can't see it, somehow)

Is it really 500GB? or is this the usual trick of using base 10?

HD manufacturers are unlikely to change their base 10 approach unless legally obliged - think about it, they'd all have to do it at the same time and even then it would look bad compared to "older" drives.

So this one's likely to be about 453Gb after formatting. The problem's just going to get worse as the numbers get bigger

Since they list 'Gigabytes' (GB), it is safe to assume it is base-10 Gigas.

'Gibibytes' (GiB) are the base-2 version, I recently learned.

Though as with clothes sizes, where getting one manufacturer to agree with another exactly how big a centimeter/inch is, reality might be more of a challenge!

Just think how many unencrypted personal financial details you could get on a drive like that if you work for some sort of government agency/accountancy firm.

Slam it in a USB2 enclosure and you could probably plug into into an unmanned PC at HRMC - or ask a junior to do it for you, and blag that you could get him sacked for refusing to co-operate..

All these HD will eventually obsolete replace with the nano technology chips hold terabytes as small as a stamp with only .05 mm thickness. I couldn't remember the company name mentioned in a technology business magazine with millionaires sportsmen and billionaires heavily invested into the new starter-up specialist company. Apple iPhone and IPod should be the company to deploy such technology if not mistaken.