Hitachi Travelstar HD

[dickchailey]

I recently bought a job lot of HD's which included a number of Hitachi DK23EA-30 drives. They were overprinted with a label HD20.G. I understand they were removed from Thinkpads.
As is they format to 20GB. I ran Hitachi disk tools and this reported the drive as a 30Gb drive with 20Gb capacity but gave me the option to set the drive to 30Gb capacity. This worked and the drive formatted to 30Gb in windows. Anyone know why these drives were set up like this or if there are issues with changing the capacity? (it was not a hidden partition, the disk parameters were set to give a reduced capacity).

[Robbyrobot]

Possibly some sort of marketing ploy, a way to sell a higher-capacity drive for the price of a smaller one. Or perhaps the drives were unreliable when set up for 30GB... might be worthwhile running the various reliability tests on the full 30GB just to be sure. Otherwise no idea.