Super Heavy Hard Drive

I am in the market for a new hard drive for a PC on our SOHO and was checking out the 3/4 terabytes (actually 750 Gb, but what’s a few bytes between friends) HDDs available from UK supplier Digital Kind.

This hard drive seemed okay at first glance. 750 gigs of space, a 16 Mb buffer, 7200 rpm spin speed, all the usual features. But, then I spotted the weight!

Apparently, this obese little Seagate weighs a staggering 720 kilograms! Surely, there’s some mistake. More worryingly from the Sig Figs’ point of view though, is that the site also gives the weight in pounds. And, you guessed it, they apply a high resolution conversion factor and come up with a huge dose of unwarranted precision in the value of 1587.33 lbs.

They do the same in the device dimensions too, only this time they move from imperial measurements, a width of 5.79 inches becoming 146.99 mm so an extra two significant figures there. And, who ever measured inches with a decimal point anyway, that’s what fractions were invented for, halfs, quarters, eighths, sixteenths etc?