I knew it remains a possibility. And I’ve seen it myself, from time to time. But this morning, I got slapped in the face with it: Copilot still hallucinates occasionally. I’m assembling parts to migrate my production desktop over from a 2016 vintage i7 Skylake desktop rig. I’m moving to a snappy 32-core Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra. I need a lot of storage for that setup, so I asked Copilot the question in the lead-in graphic: “What’s the highest-capacity 2.5″ hard disk available right now?” I was stunned by the answer at at first, then…

Showing Copilot Still Hallucinates Occasionally

I’ve got a couple of Seagate 5TB HDDs here at Chez Tittel. I purchased them 3 years ago. At the time, they were the biggest 2.5″ drives available. And as it happens 5TB Seagates are STILL the biggest 2.5″ models for sale today.

Follow the link to the Tom’s story cited in the Copilot response. Then jump to Amazon for that Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB item. Guess what? It clearly says “CMR 3.5 inch SATA 6 Gb/s, 7,200 RPM, 256 MB Cache” in laying out that drive’s specifications. It’s not a 2.5″ drive, period.

The good news is: if I want to use a 5TB 2.5″ HDD in this rig, I’ve already go two of them. The bad news is they’re pretty slow, as old-fashioned mechanical storage media can’t help but be. But there’s another hope!

Given the 5TB Limit, I consider 4 TB NVMe

Gosh, there’s not much capacity difference (25% figuring up, and 20% figuring down) between a 5 TB HDD and a 4 TB NVMe SSD. I’m coming around to the idea that I should buy a 4 TB NVMe for my second storage slot in the P3 Ultra. Decent models are available for around US$300, while the 5TB Seagate HDD costs US$233 or so. This provides roughly 10X the speed for 130% of the price. That’s a good trade-off. I’m still thinking but now I know how I’m leaning.

In the meantime, keep checking those blithe and speedy Copilot answers carefully. You wouldn’t want to be misled. Here in Windows-World it’s smart to stay skeptical, and double check what AI tells you.