Computer Makers Sued Over Hard Drive Size

FPCat writes "Finally, some one is doing something about one of my pet peeves. It seems a group of people are suing Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, and others for misleading consumers about hard disk sizes. About time someone spoke up and said '1000 MB != 1 GB'" It's not much of a mystery to anyone who's up on industry practices, but it's similar to the way graphic displays are sized, cereal boxes are filled, and so on. Andy Rooney could have a field day with this one.

Comments

It's not the size of your disk

[Anonymous Coward]

It's how you use it. (Look, someone had to make the joke.)

Re:It's not the size of your disk

[KikassAssassin]

[dark helmet]
So, I see that your hard drive is as BIG AS MINE! Now... let's see how well you handle it.
[/dark helmet]

Re:It's not the size of your disk

[Frymaster]

only to find out that its four or five megabytes too small?

read the originial post, hard drives are packed "like cereal".

setteling may occur.

Re:It's not the size of your disk

[GreenKiwi]

[dark helmet]
So, I see that your hard disk is as BIG AS MINE! Now... let's see how well you handle it.
[/dark helmet]

With a little change it sounds even better...

Ewww!

[HeroicAutobot]

From the article (emphasis mine):

The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees.

I'm not sure what disgorgement means, but it sounds really gross.

Re:Ewww!

[civad]

disgorge
v. disgorged, disgorging, disgorges
v. tr.

1. To bring up and expel from the throat or stomach; vomit.
2. To discharge violently; spew.
3. To surrender (stolen goods or money, for example) unwillingly.

I would love it if the statement "The lawsuit asks......" uses disgorgement to describe the first meaning. I doubt Apple, etc. would do as meaning (2) suggests. Meaning (3) seems appropriate in this context.

RIAA chuckles in background

[Lord_Dweomer]

"That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs"

Oh the horror!!!!!!!!

Re:RIAA chuckles in background

[nelsonal]

Great now the RIAA will sue the HD makers for making the disks too small and reducing their potential infringment collections by $300,000,000 per user. In other news SCO has announced that their patent portfolio includes all uses of the term giga- in referance to both base 10 systems and base 2 systems.

In Other News:

[wo1verin3]

From the Article:
>>For example, when a consumer buys what he
>>thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the
>>plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140
>>gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10
>>gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra
>>2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.

In other news, the RIAA is going the way of minority report and has started a new pre-download offensive.

The RIAA is now hunting children down and suing parents over the potential songs that could be stored in the extra 10GB missing on 150GB hard disks.

...monitors should be next!

[DevNull]

17" monitors, with 15.7" viewable?
Ya, I have an 11 inch... but you can only see 6.

Re:...monitors should be next!

[Krach42]

I saw an LCD monitor that was 15" but 16" viewable.

I guess they had some extra screen space that wasn't actually used for display...

no, I still don't know what they were thinking.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[PurpleBob]

Helpful hint:
2^3 = 8
2^10 = 1024

Re:Another reason why we need tort reform

[GordoSlasher]

So, a bunch of lawyers get obscenely rich and 2 years from now we all get a $5.00 coupon toward the purchase of a new disk.

I was expecting $5.12

That's what they want you to think

[Compact Dick]

But the truth is most women find bigger is better.

Yes I would know.

Re:That's what they want you to think

[d3kk]

According to an email I just recieved, there is something I can do about it. In 8 weeks, no less.

Re:About TIME!

[michaeltoe]

Explaining the binary system to a nation which can't even handle metric notation is unlikely to happen, even if the movement is backed by an angry mob...

Re:Nonsense

[Crispy Critters]

"Megalopolis, anyone? I'm pretty sure it doesn't refer to one million cities"

Right! Does "gigantic" refer to one billion ntics? Of course not!

I have to admit that grep '^giga' /usr/share/dict/words did not prove nearly as amusing as I had hoped.

I find it ironic...

[sheetsda]

that I can store roughly one first person shooter per gib of drive space.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[Spazmania]

government mandate that tech companies have to use binary SI prefixes on labels.

Not likely. Most human beings count in 10s. Only technogeeks like us count in 2s. If the government standardized on anything, it'd be powers of 10.

Which means we'd all get to buy 1074 megabyte sticks of ram instead of 1 gigabyte sticks. Hey, how about that! An extra 74 megs for free. ;)

Oh my, the RIAA is gonna love that one.

[DaBj]

"That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs"

"Your honour, we couldn't download as many songs from kazaa as we hoped when we bought the drives."

ads

[QEDog]

This is insanely stupid, I can imagine in the near future the ads:

This computer comes with 100GB of HD*!

*HD size may vary. Some restrictions apply. Professional in a closed course. Caution, do not eat, migh be hot. Do not insert into ear canal. May cause seizure. May cause drowsyness...

Re:ads

[zurab]

This reminds me - just today I was looking at Rio portable players and when I checked out newer Nitrus model with "1.5GB" storage, it actually has an asterisk explaining that figure that says:

*1 GB equals 1,000,000,000 bytes

I was thinking how can they get away with that outright lie! Imagine this type of advertizing:

New Item! - Buy Ten* CD-R Discs and get 5 more FREE! Low price of $5.00 for 15 CD-R discs!!!
*Ten cd-r discs = 9 cd-r discs

And then I see this /. story and a lawsuit. I wonder if multi-media storage manufacturers are next.

Re:ads

[Epistax]

This does really matter from advertising, and one has to wonder how long they are allowed to lie. 1024 bytes aren't far from 1000, but how about a terabyte harddrive? With the current trend, you'd only get 91% of what you expect.

Re:ads

[mairas]

Oh, you mean like with, say, modems, where 14.4kbps = 14,400bps, 28.8kbps = 28,800 bps, and so on?

Or Ethernet, where 10Mbps = 10,000,000bps, and 100Mbps = 100,000,000bps?

But that is telecommunications, where the prefixes have been always powers of ten. If your data is lying still (or maybe rotating 60 rounds per second), it's powers of two, but if it's travelling through wires or thin air, it's powers of ten. Simple, ne?

Re:ads

[mickwd]

"Had I purchased a hard drive to use as part of a support for holding up my car or as part of a wind chime or as a hat, I would expect the magnitude prefix to reflect the SI prefixes (1G = 10^9)."

Thank you, Sir, for writing the strangest sentence I have ever read.

You don't, perchance, happen to own a 10.24-gallon-hat, do you ?

Re:Whats next? 56k!=56k/s?

[Mad Marlin]

No, they did not. You young'uns probably don't remember it, but the first hard drive I ever owned was 10MB - 10240KB, on the dot (give or take a few bytes).

The first drive I bought that had this "SI compliance" misfeature was a 2 GB one, from Conner if I recall correctly. I think they are out of business now. The hard drive before that was 540 real MB's, and all of the ones before that were correct too, back to my first hard drive, which was 20 MB.

On a related note, one of my comp-sci professors always wrote mb instead of MB for megabytes. I was originally in engineering physics, where it is drilled into you to be anal-retentive with respects to units, and it pissed me off, because my first reaction was generally "what the hell is a millibit?"

Yay! Class action law suit!

[Greyfox]

If they win, all hard drive owners will get a certificate good for 2,000,000 bytes and the lawyers will get $5,783,774!

Re:Mine is only 3GB

[Neon Spiral Injector]

All of mine are wide, ultra wide in fact, and hot swappable to boot.

Remedy

[Compact Dick]

After tjat I took a course in marketing. Now it's no longer small, but compact.

It's all about presentation!

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Gibibyte -- still getting used to that one ...

Not to mention the Giglibite, recently introduced Si unit of measurement for how badly a movie bites.

Would those that modded that "Insightful" explain.

[Kjella]

I'll restate the parent post as a logic conclusion:

kilo != 10^3
kilo == 1000
------------
10^3 != 1000

Were you by any chance resposible for the old karma system, also known as "Slashdot math"?

Kjella

I can see it now...

[cwsulliv]

PC ad:
"Special: Upgrade to 1 Gigabyte RAM today and get an extra 7% more memory absolutely FREE!!!:

Re:Mine is only 3GB

[driverEight]

All of mine are wide, ultra wide in fact, and hot swappable to boot.

I'll bet it's ultra fast too!