Intenso High Speed Line 125GB update (WHL #117F1)
Tiny update on the USB drive with less-than-advertised capacity: I have now two replies in my mailbox, one from the manufacturer Intenso, one from the local Eichamt (Weights and measures office).
The manufacturer states, after a bit of bullshit concerning my “professional” use of this “home/SOHO” device (they know exactly that have replaced the excellent chipset with cheap crap, and now a week of use at the office is misuse and voids the warranty, degrades performance, blabla):
Diese fehlende Kapazität ist für ein Speichermedium (im Bereich Consumer Electronics) marktüblich.
This lack of capacity is customary for a storage medium in the consumer electronics sector.
(this is after arguing the typical GiB vs GB advertising thing)
The government office however took a couple internal mails back and forth, they apparently haven’t dealt with that kind of gauging issue before and they don’t really feel responsible in that area. They would be the go-to guys if I had like bought a pack of ten drive and the manufacturer only put in nine units, but if each individual drive isn’t capable of what’s advertised on the box, they aren’t. They also nicely asked around, but apparently there is no legal framework for the filling level of digital things, like there is for filling beverage bottles and cans and whatnot. According to their expertise, we’re still in the Wild West of digital things, and in Germany, we call that Neuland™:
Weder bei Fertigpackungen noch bei Messgrößen in der Mess- und Eichverordnung (§ 1 Abs. 1 MessEV) sind Bytes genannt.
Voraussetzung für das Tätigwerden einer Behörde ist, dass gesetzlich Anforderungen normiert sind. Vorliegend scheint das unserer Recherche nicht der Fall zu sein. Aus dem eigenen Haus, der Abteilung 11 (Marktüberwachung) haben wir Fehlanzeige erhalten. Weiter konnte ich keinerlei gesetzliche Regelung finden (national und EU-Seitig), die hier einschlägig sein könnte.
Bytes are not mentioned either in the context of prepackaged goods or in the units of measurement specified in the Measurement and Calibration Ordinance (Section 1(1) MessEV).
For a government agency to take action, legal requirements must be standardized. Based on our research, this does not appear to be the case here. We received a “no information available” response from our own Department 11 (Market Surveillance). Furthermore, I was unable to find any legal regulations (at the national or EU level) that might be relevant here.
Their advice is to contact a consumer agency that deals with scammy business practices day in and day out, and that’s probably the best way forward. Suing them individually for the missing 3% of capacity doesn’t really make sense, they’ll default to a technical defect (oh no!) and just replace the thing with one of the good ones from back then.
Well, safe to say I’m not going to be a Intenso customer within the next 20 years again – except if the consumer agency needs a proof of purchase as a private individual…then I’m going to order one from Amazon and immediately return it for not meeting the advertised capacity…🙃
