When the marketers rules the roost, stupidity is sure to ensue. Case in example is frequently deserving beatdown masters Best Buy. This Sunday's insert advertisement in my paper includes a deal on a Hitachi 250GB 7200RPM Hard Drive with 8MB buffer. The text for this deal is

Enjoy fast system boot up and quick screen refreshes with data transfer rates up to 100Mbps.(sic)

Let's dissect this:

fast system boot up: Okay, I can live with that--a faster hard drive will contribute to a faster boot time. I'll give them that.

quick screen refreshes: Huh? Your drive speed isn't going to affect the screen refresh rate. This is just stupid--it's all about your graphics card.

data transfer rates up to 100Mbps: Ummm, data transfer rates are in MB per second, not Mbps. This is a common error made by marketing idiots. Let's do the math here. A byte is 8 bits, so this drive runs at 100 megabits per second times 1 byte per 8 bits, so this drive runs at (according to Best Buy ad flunky) a maximum of 12.5 megabytes per second. That's a pretty pathetic drive by today's standards, heh heh.

Needless to say, the moron who wrote this and got his copy mixed up for a hard drive, a graphics card, and a network adapter requires a beat down.



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