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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.
It's how you use it. (Look, someone had to make the joke.)
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.
Oh the horror!!!!!!!!
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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.
17" monitors, with 15.7" viewable?
Ya, I have an 11 inch... but you can only see 6.
---------------------------- DevNull - a discernible void in the province of Saskatchewan
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.
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!
But the truth is most women find bigger is better.
Yes I would know.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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?
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.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
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. . .
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...
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.
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.
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.
A lot of people here have claimed that the *bi prefixes are SI standards. They aren't. They're IEC standards.
that I can store roughly one first person shooter per gib of drive space.
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.
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.
"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."
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
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...
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
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?"
Best Slashdot comment ever
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
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'.
All of mine are wide, ultra wide in fact, and hot swappable to boot.
No! CD-R uses binary prefixes and DVD-R uses decimal prefixes. Actually, in reality, both CD-R and DVD-R capacity labels are inaccurate under either the binary or the decimal interpretation, but you have to really be splitting hairs to notice.
The exact expected capacity of normal sized CD-Rs (not counting overburning, yadda yadda) is as follows:
- For 74 minute CD-Rs, the capacity is 74*60*44100*2*2*2048/2352 = 681984000 bytes, or 650.390625 binary MiB (exactly, no roundoff error).
- For 80 minute CD-Rs, the capacity is 80*60*44100*2*2*2048/2352 = 737280000 bytes, or 703.125 binary MiB (again, this figure is exact, not rounded off).
For DVD+/-R[W] media, the exact capacity is 4697620480 bytes, or just shy of 4.7 decimal GB. The capacity of a DVD-R is certainly nowhere near 4.7 binary GB.After tjat I took a course in marketing. Now it's no longer small, but compact.
It's all about presentation!
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
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.