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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.
Thats just stupid. I think the lawsuit is innapropriate.
HD manufacturers always measuered their disks like that.
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 binary switchover happened as a marketing scheme sometime between 100MB and 1GB - it was at one of those two milestones, as one of the major manufacturers wanted bragging rights getting there first, as I recall. Since then, all sorts of revisionist history has been written claiming that 1GB was really 1,000MB all along when it plain and simply is not true.
Look, whatever the dictionary tells you "giga" means, this is a technical term that means something else in the computer world, and has always meant something else in the computer world. The same way that words like "token ring" don't mean the same thing in PC land as they do in real life. If you bought a "token ring adapter" from Cisco and opened the box to find a device that allowed you to slip a Cracker Jack box toy ring over your finger, would you not feel a bit deceived?
I would support a government mandate that tech companies have to use binary SI prefixes on labels.
Mandating the current use of gigabyte but that it means 10^9 is too trouble some, but saying gibibytes is simple, people that don't care will either read it as "giga" not realizing, or be told by sales-people that its "the same thing". and they won't be surprised when the drive is the wrong size.
We have mandates on product labeling for many other products I think its time we force the industry to be upfront. Don't think this is an accident, the drive manufacturers knew EXACTLY what they were doing when they started using standard SI meanings for the prefixes, rather than the industry accepted practice.
Car, truck, and motorcycle represent their motors rounded usually to the nearest 100. My 1100cc motorcycle is actually onlt 1085cc. Isnt this sort of behavior rampany? Are 50mg pills always 50mg? Certainly 2x4 lumber is not actually 2x4. I would think making everything absolutely accurate would simple confuse the average consumer.
This just seems silly.
Heh, I remember when Apple actually did it THE OTHER way. I was trying to look up a Maxtor 4.0 GB HD that shipped in one of my macs, and could not find any mention of such a hd. The Apple specs clearly said it was 4.0 GB. But it turned out that Maxtor classified these as 4.3GB, whereas apple used the 1024 size cound, rather than the 1000 that maxtor used. Heh.
So Apple went with the flow and started marketing 12" monitors as 13". And for a time it was good.
Until the industry got slapped with a deceptive advertising suit or something. But rather than market it CORRECTLY, now more ink is wasted when ads are printed with disclaimers, like "* 18.1" viewable" on 19" CRT screens.
I've always had such problems with RAIDs, etc, of finding an identical drive to plug in when one dies, that I've gotten in the habit of buying a couple at a time, and just leaving them on a shelf. The one time a customer called me on it, I pointed out that, since I was billing at 150.00 an hour, buying a drive 200 dollar drive that would save me 3 hours of work was a bargain for them.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The computer science community has accepted, by long use, the definition of 1KB=2^10 bytes. This means that, although it is inconsistent with the SI definitions of the quantifiers, this is a de facto industry standard; one which hardware manufacturers have intentionally defied for years. That this is not the SI meaning of those quantifiers is a moot point.
Mega means "1 million". Computer scientists started using the term Mega to identify 2^20, which isn't actually 1 million....they were approximating. In this case, it's the computer scientists who gave an alternate meaning to a common numerical term...not HD manufacturers.
A modern day witchhunt.
In the computer world, metric prefixes are base 10 when they refer to time or a rate and base 2 when they refer to data size.
Why?
Times/rates use base 10 because, as is suggested earlier, it's the standard for the metric system. It makes sense to have the same prefixes mean the same thing across the board. Since time is arbitrary anyway, it makes sense to use the "regular" metric prefixes.
Data size uses base 2 because of the way computers access memory. If you have a 8-bit address, you can have 256 chunks of memory. Likewise, if you have a 10-bit address, you can have 1024 chunks of memory. It takes the same number of address bits to have 1000 as it does to have 1024 and the hardware is generally simpler if you only deal with powers of 2. So since data-storage hardware is organized into groups that are powers of 2, it makes sense to use powers of 2 for the prefixes.
The argument is very much similar to the argument against the English system. Both systems are used because you want simple conversions. I have 1,000 fluid drams of something. How many fluid ounces is that? Likewise, if you always end up with 1024 units of something, why would you use 1000 as your base instead of 1024? Does it make more sense to have all of your data coming in multiples of 1.024 or in multiples of 1?
Hard drive manufacturers get away with it because hard drives aren't optimized in quite the same way as RAM. Hard drives are circular, so there's really very little benefit to making them contain 2^3n bits. You may end up dividing a hard drive in any event, and chances are your hard drive isn't exactly the maximum size your OS can handle. RAM, on the other hand, can easily be at the absolute maximum amount that a motherboard can handle. In that case, it makes sense to have 2^3n bits instead of 10^n bits. It needs the same size address and 2^3n is easier to manufacture, so ram always comes in powers of 2.