If you’re looking for a new laptop, you’ll need to double-check the storage on those listings. A worrying new trend, spotted in recent weeks, shows that third-party sellers of popular laptop brands are marketing their laptops with terabytes of storage, despite only including a measly 128GB of physical storage capacity, with the rest made up of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage. It's enough for it to be called a "borderline scam" by one angry commentator.This has been rumbling on for some time, with complaints on Reddit and social media from bemused consumers about the practice. It’s fair to say that marketing a laptop with over eight times the actual storage it has isn’t ideal, but a further fly in the ointment is that the capacity being offered isn’t even permanent.The problem appears most prevalent on Amazon. A quick search of the retailing behemoth shows several laptops on sale from major brands, including HP and Lenovo, with listings that prominently advertise over 1TB of storage, with the majority made up of Microsoft’s cloud storage offering. This HP laptop, for instance, shows a 'limited-time deal' price of $499.99 for a laptop that supposedly offers 1.1TB of storage, but 1TB of that is from OneDrive cloud storage.
