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So, I've noticed several things about devices I've seen in person. I have a Western Digital My Book 3TB External Drive Plugged into my PC that I bought from one store because it was on sale and I needed extra storage capacity. Then, at another store, I saw they sold the same external hard drive with a 4TB Disk Capacity. I also have 5 SanDisk Cruiser Glide flash drives, completely identical except for the fact that one of the drives has 16 GigaBytes of storage, another has 128 GigaBytes of storage, and the rest have 32 GigaBytes worth of storage.

So, with all this info, I believe manufacturers are manufacturing the drives with the same parts but limiting the capacity of the drive that's allocated and the prices are higher when the capacities are higher. So, my question's are if it's possible to expand the total storage capacity of these devices, such as expanding the 16GB Flash Drive to 128GB and the 3TB Hard Drive to 4TB, how do I do it? If I do it, do I lose the data on the drive itself? How do I tell if the drive can handle the capacity I give it? How can I tell up to what capacity the drive can handle? I have searched the internet and the answers seem to be quite irrelevant.

If you can shed any light on this, please do.

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    What makes you think it was "the same drive"? Just because they look identical on the outside does not mean they are.
    – terdon
    Nov 22, 2014 at 19:27
  • Besides this not about Ubuntu but about hardware... really? You really believe a 16Gb usb has actually a 128Gb flashdrive in it? You really think manufacturers would accept less profit since a 128Gb flash drive is far more expensive to make.
    – Rinzwind
    Nov 22, 2014 at 19:28
  • It makes sense to reuse as much as they can.That however doesn't include the storage. They use (roughly) the same boards and controllers, storage chips or hard drives of the correct size, and if needed, firmware specific to the parts they chose to use. Nov 22, 2014 at 21:49

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There's no magic switch to flip to make it bigger. End of answer. Congratulations on a handy conspiracy theory.

Storage devices aren't like Atheros wireless devices where they used a wireless chipset across all their products and limited the channel capabilities in software.

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