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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.
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'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
1. For hard drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB
2. For RAM, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
3. For mp3 players, it depends
4. For CD-R, DVD-R/w, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
5. For USB flash drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB.
Unless you are very used to dealing with these markets, they can be hellishly difficult to understand.
those hard drives that are sold as 80gb drives, but have 20GB partitions allocated for the OS 'backup'. That's my pet peave. Luckally I don't buy systems with that 'feature'
If PDA manufacturers can get sued for it, why not their desktop counterparts?
Bye!
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.
This is of course why 19 inch monitors are now labeld with thier viewable size in addition to the tube size. Because of a lawsuit just like this...
Americans could not be more self absorbed if they were made of equal parts water and paper towel. -Dennis Miller
I mean, who decided you could do this? My 120 gig drive is really only 112 gigs. If I sold gasoline for 1.29 a gallon, then put a little footnoot on my sign that said "*Gallon is used to mean 32 oz" you better believe I'd be sued. You can't just redefine things like that -- its deceptive. How many people buy 120 gig hard drivers not realizing they're really only getting 112 gigabytes?
Also, as a side note if anyone else is looking to sue someone, ice cream manufacturers recently reduced the amount of ice cream in their half-gallon containers rather than raise the cost. Despite the fact that thye no longer actually contain a half gallon, they are still clearly labelled "half gallon" on the containers (Though the ounces are properly listed, and anyone who knows how many ounces there are in a gallon knows they're being shortchanged).
Deceptive marketting practices make baby jesus cry. . .
As long as they tell you their "20GByte" drive is actually 20,000,000,000 bytes unformated (which Maxtor does), then I don't see the problem. I was under the impression that every hard driver manufacturer used a multiplier of 1000 instead of 1024, in which case it is pretty hard to call this anticompetive behaviour. In fact, it is just the opposite -- every manufacturer was forced to use this definition to avoid unfavorable price/size comparisons with other vendors.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Can you say "frivilous lawsuit?" We've got the RIAA, the "Patriot" act and SCO out there, and they're suing over 1000 vs 1024? My thoughts:
* If you actually know what 2^10, 2^20, etc is, you already know enough to see if the manufacturer means 1000 or 1024.
* If you don't, you're not going to notice a few percent difference.
* The average moron falls under number 2.
I mean, this is practically the *meaning* of a trivial lawsuit. No one will get anything from this except a bunch of scummy lawyers (Not that all lawyers are scum; it's just that the scum get more attention)
Personally, I think that when the law code is so convoluted, long, cross-linked, and full of antique, useless waste that you can make millions of dollars interperting it for others, it's time to do a serious code audit.
Yeah, but look who they're suing. Not really many HD manufacturers. Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba. OK, IBM does make HDs. But these companies sell complete PC systems. And therein lies the problem.
Another poster has pointed out that some components are measured in SI-unit GigaBytes (=10^9 bytes), such as RAM or CD-Rs, while others are measured in Binary-unit Gigabytes (=2^30 bytes = 1 GiB), such as HDs.
Now, the plain hard drive manufacturers haven't been sued because they are consistently using only SI units. But the desktop PC sellers are advertising using MBs and GBs everywhere, (deliberately? unknowingly?) not paying attention to the differences, thereby misleading the consumer.
They'll say "look, it's got 512MB of RAM and 80 GB hard drive space," but that is actually 536,870,912 bytes vs. 80,000,000,000 bytes (which is closer to 74.5 GB). And that is some good ground to sue on.
But suing computer makers? how is this going to keep hard drive, nay, computer costs down when the lawyer's fee are going to get admortised in to the costs?
Except here common knowledge is against the 1024 non-standard. Ask a thousand random people how many things are in a kilothing and see what response you get.
90% or more would answer "1000".
Common knowledge is on the side of the drive people, not the geeky people.
Not only that, but they do disclose, so anyone who knows enough to be bothered by a ~2.5% difference in drive capacity can easily check the fine print.
Man you GiB fan boys amaze me. As has been said 100 times already, bytes are not SI units, the SI prefixes do not apply. They are not metric units. A byte is a computer unit. We do this all the time in every day life, the same word can have different meanings in different contexts. If your NRA buddy is talking about a new rack, he could be refering to a gun rack. A nerd friend might be talking about a server rack. Another friend could be talking about a woman's breasts. It's the same word, but with different meanings.
In the computing world, the giga prefix means 2^30. In the physical world it means 10^9. Different contexts, different meanings. Give it up.
-matt
Unless they've got some strange units of memory (someone please correct me if this is the case), their memory cache sizes are measured in powers of two but their drive storage sizes are measured in powers of ten.
Here's an example - this is a Maxtor data sheet that shows the details for this drive - they cleverly point out in very small print (I had to go to +4 magnification in xpdf to even read it) that GB = 1 billion bytes, but they make no claim about what MB means. The
front page for the drive doesn't mention it at all. I'm sure Maxtor is representative of all drive manufacturers in this regard.
How could that be? Hmmm.....
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
No, they are lying. NIST probably isn't lying, technically, because of lack of requisite intent, but they're wrong here.
In computer science, a kilobyte 2^10 bits, a megabyte 2^20 etc. Always has been, always will be.
This isn't contradictory to the SI use, our words are very often used in very different ways in different contexts. Is a megalopolis a million cities? A megalomaniac a million maniacs? Of course not. People of normal intelligence shouldn't really have to have this explained to them.
In the world of digital computers, base10 units don't make much sense, so they aren't used. The prefixes are used to refer instead to the base 2 numbers that are important, and very close.
I don't remember anyone getting confused over this until the hard drive manufacturers decided to inflate their capacity figures some years back. A cheap trick that they then had to defend, so they and their shills have started laying on this crap real thick instead of just admitting the obvious. And they've even managed to flummox the NIST into thinking there was confusion here and they needed to rig a fix. So you get the silly hack you reference that practically no one has ever used or even heard of. It's not needed - the only source of confusion here is the harddisk manufacturers, and the solution is simple - they need to quit lying.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Of course this is stupid.. But it makes the attorneys some quick spending cash.
Remember, regardless of the outcome, both sides have to pay their legal people..
THIS is what we have reduced too in this country.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I doubt it. Megabyte and Gigabyte are used in the computer industry to denote specific sizes, and have been for many years. This is like getting screwed over at a gas station because some dumbass decided that a gallon was equal to a pint because some Sumerian chicken measurements used a GAL prefix or something equally stupid.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Let's go after them about monitor (and TV) sizes. This shit about a 17" monitor (or whatever) is bullshit. Sure the tube is 17" OUT OF THE FUCKING BEZEL! Then they put in small print * 15.2" viewable *
KMFA you buttholes! How about plastering the TRUE viewable area all over the box.
I'm so bloody sick of all these deceptive practices. Just like gasoline, $1.49 and 9/10. Like you can buy gas in 9/10's of a cent at a time. It's a RIP OFF scheme. You lose 1/10 of a cent each gallon you buy. They GAIN 1/10 of a cent each gallon you buy. Over the long haul they haul tons of $$$$ to the bank..
Everyone has to be a thief these days..
15.7" of course being the diagonal measurement because everyone knows it's natural to measure the size of a rectangle by its diagonal.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
A gibibyte? Jesus. I'm aware that these are standard SI terms, but at some point you've got to let common sense step in.
My production server at work has 24 gigabytes of RAM, by which I mean it has 24 x 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 bytes of RAM. I assume that you would claim this machine has 24 gibibytes of RAM, or that your desktop has 512 mebibytes of RAM, or that this particular object module is 72 kibibytes in size, then? If I started throwing around terms like that, people would look at me like I had gone completely batshit.
"megabyte" and "gigabyte", as they pertain to computer storage, have always been based off of multiples of 1024. This is different than the traditional meanings of these prefixes, but that's a separate issue (and it's hardly new; they've been around for more than fifty years.) What is new is how HDD manufacturers have silently discarded the existing meanings in order to artificially inflate the size of their media. This is a phenomenon that has come about only in recent years (i.e., in the past 5 years or so.) The fact that these manufacturers protest "But look! Technically, we're right!" is not particularly meaningful to me. 40 MB hard drives used to be 40 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. 512 MB of RAM is still 512 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, the same as it's always been. And you claim that "HD makers redefined squat?"
Another obvious example of this is CD-R versus DVD-R. A Yellow Book CD has a capacity of 650 MB, by which I mean 650 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, which is well above 650,000,000 bytes. DVD-R, on the other hand, which is advertised as a 4.7 GB medium, can only hold ~4.35 GB as gigabytes have traditionally been interpreted. So you've got one interpretation for CD-R, and another for DVD-R.
Now, you can crow about SI units all you want, and you can go around talking about how many mebibytes of RAM your laptop has and how many kibibytes this e-mail attachment consumes, but if you don't see that there has been a recent redefinition of standard computer terminology by media manufacturers to hype their products, then you are being either naive or deliberately obtuse.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
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?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
10h = 16
10h^3 = 16^3 = 4096 = 1000h
==> 10^3 = 1000 in all number systems excluding binary and ternary (which do not have a number "3")
Cthulhu fhtagn!
Joe Public buys an 80GB Hard drive and takes it home. When Windows Explorer opens, it tells him he has 74 odd GB of space.
Was he misled?