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

Unnecessary confusion

[tarquin_fim_bim]

In SI units (which most civilised counties use) M means mega which is defined as 10^6, i.e. 1000000 , it is only the computer industry that deems K (1000) to equal 1024 which it does not, then extrapolates this to give 1M = 1024 x 1024. This is absolute rubbish, a different system of quantification should be used when referring to binary powers, as the borrowing of those from SI is clearly misleading.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[jpallas]

This units issue has been covered before. There's even an actual standard.

apple says

[photoblur]

According to Apple's website

1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.

it's in the fine print at the bottom of the above linked page

From NIST...

[wirelessbuzzers]

From NIST

Unit Prefix Abbreviation
2^10 kibi Ki
2^20 mebi Mi
2^30 gibi Gi
2^40 tebi Ti
2^50 pebi Pi
2^60 exbi Ei

Examples and comparisons with SI prefixes

1 Kibit = 2^10 bit = 1024 bit
1 kbit = 10^3 bit = 1000 bit
1 MiB = 2^20 B = 1 048 576 B
1 MB = 10^6 B = 1 000 000 B
1 GiB = 2^30 B = 1 073 741 824 B
1 GB = 10^9 B = 1 000 000 000 B

In particular, 20 GB = 18.6 GiB. So, they're telling the truth, albeit in a not-so-honest way; it's really the disk info page that's lying.

It's also worth noting that EXT2 and some other UNIX-based filesystems reserve a certain percent of the space; this makes their available capacity smaller for non-root users.

Re:About TIME!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... let's see:

• Dell [One gigabyte (GB) equals one thousand megabytes (MB).]
• Apple [1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.]
• IBM [GB means 1 thousand million bytes when referring to hard drive capacity. Accessible capacity may vary]
• HP [GB (Gigabyte) - 1024 megabytes, 2^10 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.]

...looks like most of the industry learned their lesson from the monitor fiasco a few years ago.
Now, if you'll forgive me, I'll get back to looking at my 19.96-inch monitor and spinning my 73.47-times-2^10-times-2^10-times-8-bit (post-formatted capacity, using a single ext3 partition, your results may vary, not valid in Utah) hard-disk drive.

Re:ads

[xsbellx]

The HD companies are arguibly more correct in this case as they are using the definition that is used everywhere else.

No! They are not even close to being in the same galaxy as "more correct". Within the context of the computer world,

• 1K = 1024 or 2^10
• 1M = 1048576 or 2^20
• 1G = 1073741824 or 2^30
• 1T = 1099511627776 or 2^40

In case you hadn't noticed, hard drives are typically used and marketed within the context of the "computer world". 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).

However, since I, like most, purchased a hard drive to use within a computer, I expect the magnitude prefixes to accurately reflect the context of use, not some marketing scheme.