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Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives
An anonymous reader writes "Seagate has agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleges that the company mislead customers by selling them hard disk drives with less capacity than the company advertised. The suit states that Seagate's use of the decimal definition of the storage capacity term "gigabyte" was misleading and inaccurate: whereby 1GB = 1 billion bytes. In actuality, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes — a difference of approximately 7% from Seagate's figures. Seagate is saying it will offer a cash refund or free backup and recovery software."
free backup and recovery software... yea, that'll help alot.
Wow, I'm surprised that actually went through, if only because the court systems seem so broken. Hopefully, other manufacturers will get the hint and start changing their plans. I could just see this going after other manufacturers too, who insist on using smaller sizes for their measurements to seem bigger.
What is this "or"? Give both.
File online [no cash, just software]
Mail-in [cash or software, cash claim only if bought before 2006 & you have proof-of-purchase. 5% of what you paid]
1 GB (gigabyte) = 10^9 B
1 GiB (gibibyte) = 2^30 B
Seriously, the blame could just as easily be laid at the feet of the OS developers. There is a long standing history of disk manufacturers using base 10 counting numbers. It would not be so horribly difficult for the OS developers to conform to the base 10 measurement. I mean what next are the consumers going to sue because the formatting and allocation tables take up room? or perhaps because it hides space for virtual memory? seriously. come on people.
Anyone with a few functioning brain cells would look at Wikipedia to see what, exactly, a gigabyte is! A gigabyte is a SI unit- literally, 1,000,000,000 bytes. What the layman thinks is a gigabyte (1024MB) is a gibibyte, a giga-binary-byte.
Seagate was being completely honest in their branding of the package. It's the operating system, still referring to a gibibyte as a gigabyte, that is "defrauding" users of that non-existent 7% that they seem to want so badly. Hell, the IEC even recommended about 8 years ago that everybody make that distinction between gibibytes and gigabytes, and refer to them properly to avoid the exact same confusion that brought this lawsuit about.
Does this settlement mean that Seagate might actually start sizing their drives correctly?
Cash. You can buy backup software and a smaller HDD with it. If you are too dumb to use the OS's built-in backup feature.
Hard drive manufacturers have always used the ISO specification for defining the capacity of hard drives. This is nothing new.
Do your research - your point is pretty much ass-backwards. The manufacturers are quoting their sizes in gigabytes, which are SI units defined as 10^9 bytes. A gibibyte is the familiar 2^30, 1024MB unit that we all associate as being a gigabyte.
I recently got a class action settlement in the mail offering money for memory that I overpaid for back in the early 2000s. The catch is, to receive anything, I need to provide detailed information about how much memory I bought from what merchant, the brand and how much I paid. To receive the hard drive settlement, they want the same info (serial number, proof of purchase, name of retailer, price paid, etc).
I have those receipts... somewhere. Who really keeps receipts for computer parts going back a couple generations though? As an individual, I doubt the money I would receive is worth the hassle of digging up the receipts. Sure, MegaCorp may have purchased 1,000 units and have the receipt of that order and will get a hefty sum at 7% for their trouble, but most people are just going to get a couple dollars.
I'm not sure why they don't offer a token minimum amount for those who can't provide receipts (I don't see all 300 million people in the US clamoring to get a $10 check). Of course, like most class action suits, this was probably just a way for a law firm to cash in on a settlement (they get a cool $1.8 million while you get some free backup software or a couple dollars).
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Giga-anything is one billion exactly of that thing.
Wikipedia notes its techie-colloquial usage, and states that it is incorrect according to the SI/metric standard.
"The prefixes k and greater are common in computing, where they are applied to information and storage units like the bit and the byte. Since 2^10 = 1024, and 10^3 = 1000, this led to the SI prefix letters being used to denote "binary" powers. Although these are incorrect usages according to the SI standards it seems common to apply base 10 prefixes, when relating to computers, as follows..."
Strange "victory".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
SI Units vs IEEE Standard Units
If these people wanted to sue someone, they should have sued for the countless other pieces of software which use SI prefixes incorrectly.
The metric prefixes were always used for the powers of ten, not powers of two. This was made *abundantly* clear when IEC approved different names for the power of two 'equivalents' in 1998.
See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
IANAL, but I think the reason they lost is not based on whether 1GB is decimal or binary but because they did not specify the system they used to count it. If they said it was 1GB in decimal so 1GB = 1000MB and made that clear, then they probably would have been ok. But since they did not, 1GB = 1024MB was easier to demonstrate as a better, more common, and more readily accepted definition due to the way it was shown in the OS, and there was nothing on the packaging to negate this. So make sure if you use numbers, you say exactly what they are supposed to be.
Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither
yeah pretty worthless, I've bought $1000 worth of drive from them, but that's after jan 1 2006. Even if if it was before that, I would have to file 10 seperate claims for ~$5 each. Meanwhile the cocksucking trial lawyers get a cool 1.8mn in cash.
Seriously - class action lawsuits are utterly worthless. "Whoops we ripped you off by conspiring to raise memory prices tenfold. Here's a 2 dollar coupon that expires the day we get around to mailing it out and is only good at a single retailer in northern alaska. "
Seriously - How many people here paid nearly a grand for 32 meg SIMMS? Remember the "welp we had a glue factory fire so prices skyrocketed!" bullshit? Special glue just for memory ICs - and that scaled exactly with capacity? Yeah, that "glue factory fire."
"Oh yeah our batteries in our ipods are horribly defective here everyone who spent $300 on this shitty self-destructing rev of hardware and can cough up documentation gets 2 free songs on our own music store."
I'd really prefer the courts just fine the fuck out of the companies and it goes to something worthwhile - letting them use legal judgements as cheap advertising is just bullshit.
seagate owns maxtor!
seagate is the REASON maxtor drives are now crap.
and some lawyer is going to be flushing the money on hot cars and girls or boys.
Here is your $5.99.
By the way.. did we mention our $5.99 price increase on our drives?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I must be eligible for at least $100 over all the Seagate gear I bought in that period, but it'll be a cold day on the sun before I demand money from any corporation for the ignorance of other people.
Seagate has produced great drives for a long time, and they've never strayed from industry standard definitions to advertise the storage capacity. Anyone taking advantage of this settlement is either morally dishonest or technologically incompetent.
Can't read can you asshole. I said I stopped buying Maxtor over 4 years ago.. that would be 2003. If you read this: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=Seagate_Technology_To__Acquire_Maxtor_Corporation&vgnextoid=1e8a814fef83e010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD Segate bought Maxtor 2 years after that.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
"In its out-of-court settlement, Seagate proposed to pay $1000000 in damages. When the plaintiffs signed off on the agreement, Seagate lawyers indicated that this was a binary figure, paid the plaintiffs sixty-four dollars in cash and departed, apparently in some haste."
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
i think Newegg can add a "class-action lawsuit" button next to the rebate button, so they can help their customers use their money responsibly. it's the only place i buy my stuff from, and they would have proof of purchase information on file. heck, they can be like Steve Jobs, and just credit me for more purchases from their store!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Well, now someone needs to go after OS makers for "lying" because of all the wasted space depending on data block size. Sure, you can have a 1-byte file, but it'll use up 512 bytes or more space on the HD... So, which is it? Is it a 1-byte file, or really a 512-byte (or 1024 or 2048 or 4096 or...) file?
I have a 1TB HD, and, well, I want to be able to actually use every byte of it!!!
A gigabyte here, a gigabyte there, pretty soon we're going to be talking about some actual wasted disk space...
In the mid-1990s, one marketing dweeb at a low-end hard drive manufacturer (I want to say Maxtor but don't recall for sure) convinced his company to start defining 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes. It let them sell a smaller (and thus cheaper to manufacture) drive while labeling it as the same capacity as everyone else's drives. The others resisted for about a year, then gave in and started mis-labeling their drives. IBM was the last holdout, I think they went for 3 years selling bigger drives than everyone else labeled with the same capacity. Eventually they gave in too, shortly before selling their hard drive division to Hitachi.
Around 1998, the international standards bodies mandated that MB = 1,000,000 and GB = 1,000,000,000, while MiB = 1,048,576 and GiB = 1,073,741,824. But like metric in the U.S., these units have never really caught on in the computer industry. Personally I can see the standards bodies' point, but they're going to have to collaborate with OS, memory, hard drive, and other computer hardware manufacturers to get the change implemented. They can't just stand on a pedestal mandating that this change be made, and expect it to happen.
The whole fiasco is an example of a class of situations I haven't found a name for but which is similar to the Tragedy of the Commons. In these situations, one member of the group does something which gives him an advantage of the others. The others then follow suit to remain competitive, and in doing so eliminate the advantage. The end result is that the situation is now identical to what it was before the change (everyone's 500 GB drives are the same size), but now everybody is worse off because of the change (1 GB on a drive does not equal 1 GB in memory). Other situations within this class include campaign spending in politics (everyone has to spend more on advertising each year just to stay even with everyone else), and net neutrality (if everyone pays the Telecos more money for priority, they have gained nothing because the total bandwidth hasn't increased, and are now losers because they're paying more for the same bandwidth).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_formatting#Low-level_formatting_.28LLF.29_of_hard_disks
However, the various SI prefixes -- kilo, mega, giga, exa, and others -- were overloaded by the computer industry to refer to powers of two ("kilo" = 2**10, "mega" = 2**20, "giga" = 2**30) which were "pretty close" to their SI counterparts.
This has actually caused some confusion as computer people speaking of "kilo" this and "mega" that have worked with scientists who have always used the traditional SI meanings. These differences in interpretation can mean your chemical process doesn't work, the patient dies, you miss Jupiter, etc.
To help redress this problem, a new set of prefixes have been coined to refer to powers of two. These new prefixes have seen uneven but increasing adoption in the industry (if you have a recent Ubuntu/Debian release, run the command ifconfig -- the byte counts have the new prefixes).
So, the hard drive makers have been using the SI meanings for "giga" and, in case there was any confusion, explicitly printed in their literature, "One gigabyte is equal to 1000000000 bytes."
So, at first reaction, I think Seagate got screwed here. This makes me wonder if there aren't other layers of nuance that came out in court, but are lost in these stories.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
What a crock. Anyone that knows enough about computers to know that GB, MB, and KB are usually base-2 should also know enough to check whether the HDD measurement is in base-2 or base-10. Non-computer people would probably assume that they are base-10... or, more likely, merely that the bigger the number, the better. In my experience non-computer people have difficulty distinguishing between hard-drive space and RAM. Saying that they are somehow miraculously able to distinguish between base-2 and base-10 measurements is ridiculous.
The Kilo-, Mega- and Giga- prefixes are always base-10 in SI. The IT industry should come up with different terms. Misusing them was a mistake in the '60s and it is a mistake now.
How about seagate gives me a refund for me and the many other people whose hard drive has crashed as a result of crappy hardware?
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
I understand that a "gigabyte" of RAM is 2^30 bytes, but that's just because memory addresses come in powers of two. I don't expect bytes on a hard disk to be counted in powers of two, because there is no need for them to be counted that way. But apparently there are some bargain-hunters and their lawyers who have a more self-serving style of counting.
Oh well.
woops. 1GiB == 2^30 bytes, not 2^9.
-metric
frustrated me to no end when I went purchased a DVD±R ... and blank discs.
I could not seem to fit exact files onto a blank disc when I had done intensive organizing to back up my entire recording database (I fix sounds to medium... sometimes this means I make music)...
I called up the company that made the discs... which seemed like the faster route between that and getting out a magnifying glass to read some fine print that I hadn't known to look for in the first place. A half-hour later I was told they count how they do, and there was nothing I could do about it.
DAMN THEM!
So I sucked it up and did what Renton in Trainspotting does with the suppository....
so to speak that is.
Anyways, glad to see someone had some sense
"It's the Law of the Universe, and I'm the sheriff." Slash-cott 2/10-2/17
'k' mean 1000, by definition and it did so for a long, long time. Reusing the term for something different is the first stupidity, claiming it is right is the second. Now, if you want to say 1024 bytes, there is a different term for that: 1kiB. Similarly, ISO-normed terms like MiB or GiB exist and are more and more accepted in the educated computer scene.
Now, don't get me started on the meaning of a byte, which isn't 8 bits either....
So I have 6 Seagate drives, paid about $120 each = $720
I get a 5% refund, or about $36 (assuming I can find 6 receipts).
BFD.
... you are two for two.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Oh, whoops. A byte is not a SI unit. The terms kilobyte, megabyte, etc. where just sort of "made up" based on SI prefixes.
They're approximations of what would be their meaning if they were SI. It's too bad people can't just accept it.
Why would a company advertise with "kilobyte = 1000", etc.?
Obviously not because that's the correct meaning. The fact that they're the only ones that use it throws that right out.
They just want to have a higher number on their box so it looks like their product has more memory that it really does.
So what if they've been doing it for years? It's bullshit. Everyone should use the same definition. We can't magically make 2^10 = 1000, so guess who's got to change.
Management told him to take a hike. And that was the last we heard of him.
At least his first-mate didn't run-off to Commodore...he wheelied to Apple.
I'm fine with Seagate saying that for their drives 1GB is 1000000000 bytes, since there is some technical justification for that. So I suppose their mistake was they didn't label their drives accordingly.
;).
Still, I have NEVER encountered a problem with this, whether at work or elsewhere. Who goes out and buys only 200GB of HDD storage if they know they need at least 190GB? I bet most slashdotters also knew HDD GBs were different
I'll feel cheated if the drives weren't reasonably reliable and died after only just over a year (just an example NOT saying that Seagate drives are unreliable or reliable). 5 year warranty or not, doesn't matter.
So, though I have a fair number of seagate drives (I've maxtors and WDs too), I'm not going to claim a refund - I knew I was getting HDD GBs and bought them that way. Call me stupid if you want.
Wikipedia says that the new Solar Cycle is beginning this year. Sunspots are slightly cooler areas on the sun.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Ok, there's people everywhere in here saying it's stupid to say 1GB = 1024 MB, instead use GiB, blah blah, but I have an honest question: if everyone did, for whatever reason, use GiB and MiB and whatnot, of what use would MB and GB be? None, right? No one in their right mind would ever measure units on binary hardware in powers of ten. Just like I don't measure grams of soup or whatever in powers of two. I guess what I'm saying is if the switch to GiB and MiB was made in earnest then GB and MB would be utterly, completely useless -- and I see that as an argument that we might as well just use GB and MB, since it involves no conflict, fewer meaningless terms, and a more intuitive, uh, interface, if you will.
Computers were working with powers of 2 LONG before HD's were invented.
It is just the way things are done, and it seems pretty clear why HD makers use base 10 instead of what is widely accepted, it makes their drives seem bigger.
I can't think of a single OS in 20 years of computing that does not go 1024 bytes is 1 kilobyte.
Imagine if the entire world car used miles but suddenly the petrol industry decided to use kilometers instead. It would then look as if their distance per gallon was a lot better then it really is.
It is a fraud and Seagate knows it, else they would have let it come to court. Stop being such a tool.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Maxtor became crap shortly after the Quantum merger. They adopted Quantum's ways and their "No Quibble" warranty service went out the window shortly after the merger.
Getting a replacement drive could take weeks if they didn't have your capacity in stock. Maxtor would just upgrade you and send you a drive right away. Sadly, most other driver manufacturers followed their lead. When Maxtor shortened their warranty to 1 year, Western Digital followed and others followed. Seagate started offering longer warranties and reversed this trend. What was worse was Western Digital would insist on going by the manufacture date instead of the purchase date for the start of the warranty. I'd have to complain to a supervisor before they'd admit to allowing a pad of 90 days. This was the best they'd do no matter what your receipt showed as the purchase date.
I just had to have my Western Digital notebook drive replaced. It took them over a week to tell me I'd have to wait two more weeks for a replacement drive due to inventory not being available. The warranty was useless and I had to go out and buy another drive from another manufacturer. From now on, I plan to stick with Seagate.
And, I too, will be declining any settlement owed to me for the Seagate drives I've purchased. Seagate is the best of the bunch and they don't deserve this.
They only started using base 10 relatively recently. I can't tell you the exact date things started to change, somewhere in the 90's but I am 100% certain that the first HD's for home computing labelled in base 2. They had to offcourse because it is only logical as EVERYONE else used that as well.
Then some marketting genius probably noticed that their new disk was just shy of somemagic number in base 2, but reached it in base 10. But in the early days HD makers simply respected convention.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Thanks for the $5.99.
Next time I buy a hard drive, if Hitachi, Maxtor, Western Digital, Dell, etc, has it for $5.99 cheaper -- the same amount of space; I'll be checking per byte -- guess where my money goes?
With hard drives, I have pretty much no brand loyalty. If the drive fails, and it's under warranty, I get a new one, and if I wasn't backed up, that's my fault. If the drive fails, and I'm not under warranty, great excuse to get more space. I try to pay attention to reviews, etc, even the little Newegg things, but frankly, a hard drive's a hard drive -- it's pretty well commoditized now. I'll be paying much more attention to things like video cards and processors, even RAM.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
So I'm morally dishonest and technologically incompetent because lawyers make money off of litigation?
How on Earth does that work?
.. it's that there's no meaning of giga/mega/kilo that's solidly, universally accepted.
The whole thing is a mess of attempted redefinitions (MB, MiB, the 1.44meg floppy abomination) and context-dependent exceptions with varying degrees of acceptance.
If you really care, you should be checking the precise number of bytes.
If a megabyte is counted as 1024 kilobytes how's your math working? Still 8 bits to a byte right? I mean I thought a byte was a byte, are you telling me a hard disk follows different conventions? Because last time I checked binary units were pretty stable, not a lot of 'wiggle room' in the interpretation.
Quack, quack.
I received an offer letter for employment many moons ago that stated that my salary would be "$65k" - When they tried to pay me $65,000 a year there was hell to pay (so as to speak). We settled on $66,560 :-)
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
So... does this mean that all other hard drive companies are now open to being sued?
Will Seagate now advertise all its HDs with the incorrect binary prefix?
WTF is wrong with the trial judge? If Seagate wanted to advertise Gibibytes, then they would have written GiB! That's why they wrote GB instead! Is this not totally simple? What else were they supposed to write?!?!? They were technically correct in advertising the total disk space. I don't understand the judge's reasoning.
- Operating systems/software
- Memory
- Flash storage (CF, etc)
- PROMs
- CD media
Base 10 (LAWSUIT TARGETS):- Evil, evil hard drives
- Bandwidth-related hardware:
- Line cards
- Ethernet interfaces
- Modems
- Your broadband provider's advertised line speeds
- DVD media
- HD-DVD media
- Blu-Ray media
- Most (not all) USB stick-style flash storage devices
- Digital cameras' resolution
- CPU clockrate (I thought the argument against base 10 was "computers" were natively base 2)
- Latency (opposite of kilo, of course -- 1millisecond is not 1/1024 second)
A weird hybrid between the two:- Floppy disks
Units of measurement that use an international SI standard's prefix to describe something "close enough" but not equal to said international SI standard's prefix:- byte
Units of measurement that use an international SI standard's prefix:I've told you once, I've told you 1,073,741,824 times: don't approximate!!!
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Next time when I buy a kilogram of sugar, I will insist to be made from 1024 grams. I will request auto manufacturers to give the fuel efficiency in liters per 100 (1024 meters). Why wouldn't nuclear weapon yield be measured in equivalent of (1024 tons) of TNT?
Seagate don't deserve this. Hell, nobody doesn't deserve this (even if now when we reach 1TB, the difference between 10^12 and 2^40 is just a smidge under 10%
Now I can back up the data I couldn't store to space I don't have.
I could care less about the ~$5 rebate, I'm just happy to know that Seagate (and hopefully other manufacturers) will be using the correct definition from now on. I know it's relative, but every year it seems like I'm losing more space on new drives. The 35 "missing" gigabytes from a 500GB drive is definitely a sizable chunk of storage.
I really miss the days (and I'm only in my twenties) when everyone just accepted what in computer-land kilo/mega/giga/terra bytes mean, and how and where they are used in which ways, and just went along to live their lives end of story. But then, a gazillion members of sixpack professionals came along who always know better, and they just couldn't stand the use of a system besides their good old 10-based. So they created the kibi, the mibi and the gibi, the three little moron ducklings whose names can't even be whispered without an idiotic smile. Better yet, they even tell you you're a f*cking moron if you don't use their names. Well, there is strength in numbers indeed, so fight or flight. What I've kept saying is, the sixpacks have time to argue about this, the rest of us just keep working, knowing what we mean by what we say in what context, and mind our own business. Let the rest keep arguing about non-issues that they made issues by their infinite wisdom. About suing Seagate, well, we all know there are certain people on this planet whose only goal in life is to find reasons to sue someone for their cash.
As a sidenote, if I were to hire someone who'd keep arguing about this topic, I'd kick his ass so far away I'd never have to see it again until I'm ninety years old and don't give a flying f*ck anymore.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
They're usually market their products with how much compressed data their products will store. (2x physical capacity) That doesn't work with my pr0n folder...
Could not see it in the article but does anyone have information on the software that will be provided?
I meant "You made two predictions and were correct on two of them". But I suppose it could work the other way, too, if you were a lawyer.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Well no, they do deserve this. The actual capacity of the hard drives is not what is specified; unlike in your examples where a kilogram of sugar is a kilogram of sugar: what Seagate (and other companies) say is 1GB is not 1GB. While I like Seagate hard drives, I am following this for the software -- which I will never use -- because I think all digital storage manufacturers should use the correct measurement. The only reason I can think of the for the current manufacturer's measurement is retail. Their current method makes hard drives appear to have more space then they really do.
If we ignore this and Seagate has to do hardly anything, all the other manufacturers will see that people don't care that they are getting cheated and will continue selling their products with false information.
Imagine a new setting in your onboard system BIOS menu.
When "Use Moronic Byte Values" is enabled, a specially designed add-on GPU could graphically scan pixels for evidence of byte values displayed to the user. It would then alter the graphical output to the any number of Moronic Byte Value systems, including the famous "Moronic Kibibyte" (which replaces Kilobytes with Kibibytes, Megabytes with Mebibytes, etc) or the less-known "Moronic SI Recalculation" (which scans the numbers, recalculates them into SI units, and replaces the original value with the moronic SI value).
If produced as a standard chip, any vendor of graphical adaptors would be able to embed it into their products. There could even be a spin-off industry where the concept is applied to internal or external adapters with VGA plugs (like the old Voodoo VGA loopback cable) in order to ensure that older computers could benefit from this great innovation?
Hell
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
I remember when this started, I believe it was 1992.
It was at the time of the 120 MB hard drives.
Most manufactures would sell a drive larger than 120 MB, such as 124 MB, which was the nearest size of the drive, that matched the platers total, and was at least 120 MB.
For example: 124 MB = 130,023,424.
Well, one brand, I think Maxtor, called that 130 MB.
IIRC there was a threat of a lawsuit, and soon Maxtor stated on the boxes of their drives, that 1 MB = 1,000,000.
Soon after that, it seemed all the hard drive manufacturers did the same.
I think the confusion continues today, because other types of memory, such as 1 GB ram is a true binary Gigabyte = 1,073,741,824.
Plus, as many have stated already, when a hard drive is formatted on a computer, it shows binary Gigabytes, and does not use the marketing-speak of a decimal gigabyte.
Since the hard drives are used in computers, which use binary numbers for all types of memory, all manufacturers should be required to use the same.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Apparently you didn't understand what we are talking about here, and what the parent argued.
The SI-prefix G has always been 1,000,000,000. When you buy a hard drive with one gigabyte of storage capacity, it will always have a little bit more than this, due to cylinders/sectors/platters rounding. When they sell a hard drive with 500 gigabyte, it will have slightly more than 500,000,000,000 bytes. No one is trying to fool anyone here.
Now, if you go to the store and want to buy one gigagram of sugar, you expect to get no less than 1,000,000,000 grams. Anything else would be cheating. But when you go to the store and want to buy one gigabyte of storage, you suddenly expect to get a lot more?
c++;
The whole hard drive industry quotes storage capacities in base 10 SI units. Just because some ignorant consumers don't understand the difference between a Gigabyte and a Gibibyte doesn't mean that Seagate should have to pay for their ignorance. The customer got what he paid for. He should instead sue Operating System vendors for calculating storage capacities in base 2 and reporting as GB instead of either calculating in decimal or reporting as GiB.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
Notice that the SI standard was published in 1998, and IEEE accepted these new units in 2005.
Hard drive manufacturers have been fooling the public for much longer than that.
What good is an international standard (SI) if it's not homogeneous? I personally love the binary prefix and will try to start using it even more in daily speech.
It isn't a "160Gb" Hard drive anyway. It's probably 167,284,512,048 bytes.
Because the drives use "512 byte sectors" and so fitting in 160 billion bytes doesn't take a whole number of sectors.
That is merely one refutation to your statement that there's no technical merit behind using "1024=1k".
You ask anybody* on the street how big a file with 1,000,000 bytes is and they'll say "a megabyte", or maybe "a gigabyte" if they're clueless.
NOBODY except the most anal uber-geek will say "oh, that's about 0.95 megabytes".
* {Well, anybody who knows the basics of using a computer)
No sig today...
another class action suit where the lawyers get rich, a few people get a check for a couple cents, and the rest of us eat higher hard drive prices...can we class action sue the class action lawyers?!
where you buy planks of wood, it'll be "1720mm" long. Which, oddly, is exactly 6ft.
How many scientists are there in the world? Who needs to calculate how many 30cm tiles are needed to stretch 2km? OK, the calculation is easy. then again, how many 1ft tiles does it take to cover 20ftx10ft ceiling? Just as easy a calculation.
With all the debating going on whether harddrive (correct) or memory (incorrect) interpretations of labels, I have a good example of the confusion it can cause if people start listening to "a million is more than a million" stuff.
The article says Seagate refunds 6.2 million hard drives. There is no doubt that they mean 6 200 000 hard drives.
However, if people start having varying definitions of M (SI unit for million, 1 000 000) we might end up with a world that thinks they perhaps meant 6.5 million drives.
6.2 confusing M * 1024^2 ~= 6.5 real world million
That would be a world with the memory manufacturer definition of M.
Good practice would be for software developers to learn the difference. BitTorrent/Tornado and DC++ are two softwares which I know have implemented the binary SI units.
Don't redefine mathematical entities, please.
--
[Non-]anonymous coward MMN-o
They were using the correct measurement. Why don't you sue Intel and 3COM because your 100Mbps ethernet card is actually 100,000,000 million bits per second.
The problem is some OS vendors, like Microsoft, incorrectly report the drive size using a strange base-1024 system. While this system might make sense for RAM which due to technical reasons must be a power of 2. (due to binary encoding for the addressing and inability to support "gaps")
Also it's not false or misleading if everyone knows what is being done. And did you overlook that * on the box that says "* 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes."
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
During that time, I was in college. I upgraded my computer often - but I also built computers for other students for some extra cash. I bought maybe 30-40 Seagate hard drives during that interval.
So.. that's ~$150 (assuming around $100 per drive) that I should get back. But.. I have to show proof of purchase and fill out a claim form for every one of them! That's not even worth my fucking time! WTF kind of settlement is this?
--- We need more Ron Paul!
The next HDD I buy will be Seagate, I can't believe the court ruled against them!
How long does it take to transfer 1GB over an 8MBit/s link if 1 byte is 8 bits?
134 seconds?
How long does it take to transfer 1TB over an 8MBit/s link if 1 byte is 8 bits?
137438 seconds?
Yeah, seems very logic....not.
Why settle in 2007??? I've been buying hard disks advertised with "salesman's meg" since 1987! All the hard disks have been advertised with K=1000, M=1000000, G=1000000000. Why start now that we're all used to it?
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
I have a bit of a problem with this whole lawsuit
If you look at the notice, you'll see that this applies to purchase of retail drives only. Basically, the ones in the official Seagate boxes that would indicate the misleading size. "OEM" drives, which I would think most people here would be buying, don't appear to apply.
Awesome! Now to get a refund from those sneaky 'gigabit Ethernet' vendors who are offering 7% less network capacity than promised, or the dishonest processor makers selling '2.4 gigahertz' chips...
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
But you get these new, inflation/war weakened dollars.
Not the 2001. or 2002. or even early 2007. dollars.
If nothing else, this is a very good time for cash settlements.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And that's where the problem started. A bunch of computer designers mis-used the kilo prefix because it was "good enough". Well, obviously it wasn't and they are the ones ultimately responsible for this mess. But they aren't a big, evil corporation that we can sue, so we'll ignore the facts for now. Right?
Common usage of something doesn't suddenly make it correct.
I like how your username sort of matches with your ID. :P
A bit off-topic, but I did post with no karma bonus.
No existe.
Oops, apparently I didn't.
No existe.
I'd love to get what I supposedly deserve, only I don't keep receipts for hard drives I bought over a year ago. What's wrong with going by serial and date of manufacture?
The 75GXP refund bit me (I had the receipts for some reason) because I bought OEM- bastards. I've bought mostly retail seagates (about 15 maybe in the window for the suit) but I don't have the receipts.
A few will benefit, the rest get tossed.
A super long term solution, but if everyone switched to using base 16 as the default number system, not only would this issue be solved completely, but we'd have a nicer number system in general (well apart from base 12 arguably...)
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
and in common use before that-
guess what it was defined as then? 1000 or if you wish, 10 raised to the third power.
There's no precedent, and no excuse-
OS/RAM/SW are wrong, and everyone else is right. The fact that Seagate lost is a testament to our worthless legal (not justice) system. They apparently didn't have a large enough warning label declaring "Warning: Giga- still means 1,000,000,000 (but your OS will lie to you)"
Asking the US public to understand base 10 prefixes is tough enough but explaining that the same prefixes are used for base-2 as well (and not consistently either) is just a nightmare. We need two different terms. Since kilo=1000 has been around longer and is being used in millions of more places (see list above) it makes complete sense to me that it is 1024 that needs a new term. They chose kibi- and yes it sounds stupid, but that's what they picked.
When two different definitions of the same prefix are used in the same industry (computing) it is simply asking for trouble (as this case is evidence of). RAM vs HD, kilobits (base 10) versus kilobytes(base 2), and so on- it gets confusing even for those of us in the industry (1.44MB anyone?) So let's straighten out the mess and set things right. Is it so much to ask to be unambiguous? For that Seagate is wrong in using giga to mean 1,000,000,00 what are you proposing? Seagate switch to base 2? who else should switch? the entire telecom industry? CPU manufacturers? Where does "computing industry" end?
Computers use a lot of base-2 things, sure- but this is a simply matter of accurate representation of numbers. 1024 happens to be 2**10, wow that's neat, but it doesn't mean I can call it one-thousand and still be accurate. I'd be wrong. The OS does exactly this when reporting HD capacities. 1001 bytes is 0.9775390625 "kilo"bytes? no, that's wrong. it's 1.001 kilobytes.
(for the record, I can't remember ever seeing any OS declare that KB = 1024 )
When's the lawsuit for that? At least LCD's are (mostly) accurate in their size ratings.
The more of this stuff the better. IT is even worse than the car in industry in exaggerating its products performance.
Plus I've seen "128MB" flash drives that were 128,000,000 bytes..
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
Let's have a look at different storage devices and media:
* DVD-5: holds "4.7 GB", that's decimal GB.
* CD: "700 MB", that's binary GB! (GiB)
* USB-keys: Binary? Decimal? Neither!
In the case of my USB pen drive, the "MB" in "256 MB" actually equals 1000*1024 bytes!
In other words: it's about time that we standardize our units. Let MB, GB, etc. be SI units and MiB, GiB be binary units! BTW, linux (the kernel) already does it.
The engineers who introduced this notation were well aware of its different meanings in different contexts. And that context is different for main memory than it is for hard drives. Just as the word "foot" can refer to a unit of measure, the lower extremity of the vertebrate leg, the lower edge of a sail, etc. depending upon context. It was only when non-engineers started trying to meddle with things that they didn't really understand that problems arose. But who needs to understand things when you can just file a lawsuit instead?
There wasn't an ambiguity before hard disk manufacturers decided to invent one.
Yes, there was an ambiguity, and it started with marketing people. Back in the Early Eighties, in the days when music didn't suck, when the 6502 microprocessor ruled supreme in the personal computer arena, that this trouble started. Prior to this time, it was universally accepted that in the computer world K=1024. The 6502 microprocessor, found in the Apple II, the Commodore PET, the Atari 400/800, and a host of other machines, had a 16 bit address bus which means it was capable of addressing 64K of memory. In fact, that's the basis of the name Commodore 64.
Now somewhere along the line, some marketing bonehead read that 64K meant 65536 bytes, and thought "If we use K=1000, like the science nerds instead of K=1024 like the computer geeks, then we can say our machines have 65K instead of 64K. The sheeple buying these widgets will buy ours instead". And it worked. Sheeple bought the more expensive Commodore64 that had "over 65K" instead of the cheaper Commodore64 with only 64K, not knowing that they were being fleeced. Soon everyone was marketting their 64K machines as having 65K. These machines were rarely sold with hard drives. And when they were, the K from the manufacturer was 1024 bytes, but the K from the marketer was 1000.
It got worse when the IBM, Amiga, Mac, and the Atari ST lines hit the market. These machines could deal in Megabytes. The field was muddied by the folks saying a megabyte was 1000K, instead of 1024K, and further muddied by the crowd saying that 1K was 1000 instead of 1024. So, the megabyte came in three sizes, 1,000,000 bytes, 1,024,000 bytes, and it's true size, 1,048,576 bytes.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
A Byte is not an accepted SI unit of measurement therefore there is not a reasonable expectation that a gigabyte be 1 billion bytes. Since a byte is 2^3 bits to begin with its is even more unacceptable to think of as a base 10 operation. If seagate was advertising 8 Gigabits instead of 1 Gigabyte that would be more acceptable. 1 Gigabyte has always been accepted to mean 2^30 Bytes. 1 gigabit has always been 10^9 bits. They could have advertised as 1 Billion Bytes as well. You can not change the accepted notation just because it suits you. A mile is 5280 feet if you are in a car but 1852 meters if you are in a boat. Context matters.
So after reading through most of the thread, it becomes apparent that it is in fact Microsoft that should be sued here, not Seagate! What a shock!
Yes, I'm kidding, but only half. Sure, Windows isn't the only OS that reports disk size in GB when it really means GiB... but then, Seagate is also not the only HD manufacturer using the "false" numbering system.
Sadly, by now the misuse of the prefixes in OS's has become so widespread that by far the easiest solution is for HD manufacturers to just given in and use the same incorrect nomenclature. What I'd really like to see though is a lot of OS patches.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Now, seems to me, from the VERY beginning, this has been the convention. Every hard drive manufacturer uses decimal to describe the capacity of the drive, and that is, in fact, accurate. There have long been proposals of differentiating between gigabyte (decimal) and gibabyte (binary), terabyte and tibabyte, etc. It never caught on. So, now some person(s) with no knowledge of personal computer history wins a lawsuit? Considering that Seagate is the successor of Shugart, the guys who invented the personal computer hard drive, shouldn't they have had a say in the definitions of terms? Western Digital is next on the hit list...
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/history.html
The name "SI" came about in 1960, but the units and prefixes existed long before that in standards and scientific usage.
While that is true, in all reality every one knew what they were doing, it's not like it was a secret. Sure we may have griped about it, but it's nothing new and not worth it (to me) to initiate a lawsuit over. Also, even if I wanted to collect on this for all my Seagate drives, there is no reasonable way I could. Since Seagate is so awesome about their warranty I don't bother saving receipts, as a scan of the top of the drive is all they've ever needed from me at work for a replacement drive (without requiring the old one back because of security implications), for my home drives I fill out the RMA and send in my bad drive and a refurb comes back in quick order. I'm a happy customer...
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
That's how EVERYONE calculates disk space, including IBM, EMC and HDS. Is everybody going to be sued, too?
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
I believe you are missing the point entirely. The hard drive manufacturers (and other makers of storage) changed to this 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes measurement because they could sell less storage for the same money by misleading people.
It doesn't matter what the SI prefix means, because in the computer world, 1 MB = 1,048,576 bytes. That's the end of the argument. Go make a 1,000,000 byte file and see what your OS says the size is. It's not 1 MB.
Maybe I'm alone on this (though I doubt it). I personally think this is about par for the course with Seagate. From my own experience, the quality of both their product and their customer service has really gone down the crapper in the past several years - at least for consumer hard drives.
One of the very first drives I ever purchased was a 130MB Seagate IDE drive (yes, megabytes.). I think I paid around $220 for it, as an OEM drive. Without getting excessively nostalgic, that was one of the better drives I ever owned in terms of longevity.
I also managed many servers over the years with Seagate 'cudas or cheetahs, and those drives were also great.
But then I bought a drive for myself more recently and was sorely disappointed. Something in the neighborhood of 250gb (reporting as 286168MB in FreeBSD). The capacity is not my complaint, however - the reliability is. The first drive lasted about 2 months before it started coughing up endless errors and had to be replaced. And Seagate was a nightmare to deal with for support. The person I talked to on the phone - I'll call him Habib - told me that Seagate no longer offer cross-shipping for replacement drives (as certain other manufacturers still do). Habib then also cheerfully told me that if I shipped the drive in anything other than "approved" shipping material, they would void the warranty and I would not receive a replacement. Once I found the list of "approved" shipping material, I found that the materials most normal people use were all excluded - things like bubble wrap and foam peanuts are just not good enough for Seagate anymore! The specifically required that I use their clamshell packaging to send back my drive, which of course I couldn't buy locally - though they did suggest a friendly internet reseller who would sell me the packing for $20!
Eventually, I talked to Habib long enough that he talked to his "manager" and got "approval" to cross ship anyways. This all took a good 20 minutes or more out of my life - not including time on hold before Habib first answered the phone. They also included a friendly note with Habib's version of the conversation, where he said I was "very irate" and "refused to pay for packaging materials".
I don't know what happened, but I know I for one miss the old Seagate...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If you didn't know the two meanings of megabyte (base 10 or base 2) then the difference in storage capacity is meaningless to you. Who really cares. Only the class action lawyers that go after companies for crap like this. Customers get tiny minimal settlements. Lawyers get about 1/3 of the total settlement. Company has less money for R&D etc. For the life of me in this case I can't figure how the customer was harmed.
That may be true, but it sure would be nice if this causes manufactuers to start offering drives that actually contained a round number of GiB!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The few times I've had to deal with Maxtor's warranty service, everything went incredibly quickly (I believe I had the replacement within a week of noticing the disk failure). They sent back a replacement drive of the exact same model, which was convenient considering the drives were being used in a RAID array.
As for warranty, all hard disk manufacturers go by the manufacture date. But they also pad it by 6 months or so - or at least Maxtor does. You can enter the serial number on Maxtor's website and check the time remaining. It's usually been a few months more than the warranty period listed on the box.
Its not just about SI units. This is about marketing in the context of the tech industry. Within the industry, its known that 1 megabyte is 1048576 bytes etc..
It was a deliberate attempt to make their products look like they had more memory. The sales people at Seagate knew what they were doing, because that is part of the job of sales people, to bias and manipulate information to make products sound more favorable, but these sales people pushed it to far and got caught out.
I like Seagate drives, but I have no sympathy for them getting caught out.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Since when has GB WRT to hard disk drive capacity NOT been measured as 1000000000 bytes? This has *always* been the case and is uniform across HDD manufacturer. Seagate settled because they didn't want to be bothered paying lawyers to defend this nonsense.
The author is wrong to assume that GB can only mean 1024^3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
Slight correction: cars/explosives/sugar etc do not work in base 10--humans do. This is likely (my own personal theory, nothing more) a reflection of the fact that we have 10 readily available digits that make counting quite simple if you use base 10. I rather strongly suspect that if humans had 12 digits, then we would use base 12 instead. The reason computers use base 2 is analogous: there are 2 states for the transistors. I rather suspect that at some point we will figure out a simple and reliable state system that lets computers use base 10, 12, or even 16, and they will process much more information in the same number of units (can't say digits or bits--maybe hits? hexadecimal digits?). That might make them more efficient if (and I stress the iffiness of this) the energy to switch states for a particular amount of information is less than the energy to convey that same information in the lesser base.
To illustrate, hexadecimal can store in two units 16^2 different states, or peices of information--never mind what they are. Binary requires 8 (16=2^4; 4*2=8) bits to convey the exact same amount of information. Thus if switchings states costs x in binary and anything less than 8x for hexadecimal (I think--someone else might want to run through this--I am not an engineer, mathemetician or anything like that, just a lowly psychologist with delusions of computer science), then the hexadecimal is more efficient,and would potentially result in vast energy savings. Now we just need to figure out how to make this happen. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Apparently, you can only get cash refund if purchase is before January 1, 2006. Here's the complete, proposed summary e-mail: To: [Customer email address] From: Settlement Claim Administrator Subject: Notice of Seagate Hard Drive Class Action and Proposed Settlement ________________________________________________________ If you purchased a Seagate brand hard disc drive between March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007, a proposed class action settlement may affect you. A hearing has been scheduled in San Francisco Superior Court to approve the settlement. Under the settlement, you may have the right to make a claim for cash or software. You also may choose to exclude yourself from the settlement. Alternatively, you may file written objections to the settlement and appear (or have your own attorney appear) at the court hearing. If the settlement is approved and you do not exclude yourself, you give up the right to sue for the claims the settlement resolves, and you will be bound by the terms of the settlement. To learn more about or exercise any of your rights, please read below and visit www.harddrive-settlement.com. The lawsuit is Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc., San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. 453195. In the suit, the plaintiff alleges that in the sale and marketing of hard disc drives, Seagate stated that purchasers of the drives would receive approximately 7% more usable storage capacity than they actually received. Seagate has denied and continues to deny each and all of plaintiff's claims, and denies that anyone has been harmed or deserves compensation. The Court has not made a decision on the merits. You are a member of the settlement class if, between March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007, you purchased in the United States a new Seagate brand hard disc drive from an authorized Seagate retailer or distributor, separately as a Seagate product that was not pre-installed into and bundled with a personal computer or other electronic device. As part of the settlement, Seagate will make certain disclosures regarding the storage capacity of its retail hard drives. In addition, if you submit a valid claim, you will receive free backup and recovery software, or a cash payment equivalent to five percent of the net amount you paid for the hard drive (excluding taxes or rebates). To receive the software or the cash payment, you must submit a claim form available at www.harddrive-settlement.com by March 10, 2008. You may submit a claim form for each qualifying drive you purchased. To obtain the cash payment, you must have purchased your drive before January 1, 2006 and you must submit appropriate documentation or the serial number for each drive. If the settlement is approved, plaintiff's counsel will apply for an award of attorneys' fees, expenses and incentive awards not to exceed $1,792,000, to be paid separately from and in addition to the benefits available to settlement class members. All claims of settlement class members which were or could have been asserted in the litigation, based upon the facts alleged in the litigation (as well as in a related case entitled Lazar v. Seagate Technology LLC, et al., San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. 439700; and California Court of Appeal, Case No. A116350) will be released. This means that if you do not exclude yourself from the settlement class, you will give up the right to sue for the claims the settlement resolves, and you will be bound by the terms of the settlement. If you do not want to participate in this class action or be bound by this settlement you must exclude yourself from the settlement class by submitting a written request for exclusion which includes your full name and address and your request to be excluded from the class. Mail your request for exclusion to Hard Drive Settlement, c/o Rust Consulting, Inc., P.O. Box 1240, Minneapolis, MN 55400-1240. Your written request for exclusion must be received by December 21, 2007. If you exclude yourself, you will not receive the benefits of the settlement, and you cannot object to the
Long before any computers came around, there were the SI prefixes and they mean "ten to the whatever". It's a base 10 system. A kilometre is 1,000 metres, a megajoule is 1,000,000 joules, and so on. This is universal. Length, area, volume, all the same, same for all materials, same for all disciplines, etc, etc.
Then along come computers and change this. Some people decided that 2^10 was pretty close to 10^3 so they'd steal kilo and use it to mean 2^10 for computers. Ummm ok, I suppose, that's an error of about 2% so not huge, but whatever. However then computer storage kept growing so they needed bigger terms. Again they appropriated the SI term, but again they defined it to base 2. Mega was 2^20 instead of 10^6. Well, now the error is more like 5%. For giga, it's up above 7%.
None of this usage changes that it is wrong. I could see your argument if SI was some quaint little standard that nobody uses, but it is the standard used for every nation except the US for EVERYTHING. Even in the US it is used in all scientific applications. So that the prefixes are base 10 is not only well defined, but also common usage.
So really, it seems computers need to get their shit changed. Especially since they aren't consistent. For example Ethernet is rated in megabits per second using the base 10 meaning. 10base Ethernet signals at 10,000,000 bits per seconds.
Computer OSes need to get in line with the rest of the world, not the rest of the world in line with computers.
So you think everyone deserves this then!
I AM A SEXY SHOELESS GOD OF WAR!!!
It has never worked, it can't work, it will never work!
Brought to you from Europe.
Seriously, how many people think that this is how you spell "gibberish"
MOD PARENT UP. Quote: "The problem is some OS vendors, like Microsoft, incorrectly report the drive size using a strange base-1024 system."
As usual, there are useless discussions on Slashdot with little clarity. Thanks for the parent comment which makes the issue clear.
No one seems to have mentioned that there is no real refund, because the same trick is used as with rebates. The time that it takes to do the paperwork will be, for most people, worth more than the 5% refund. Lawyers may make money, but few customers will get anything.
Although I do tend to pronounce the word "misled" as "myzled" I still know how to spell it.
-- thinkyhead software and media
gets my money. Period and for good reason. Reliable hardware and golden guarantee.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Does it also mean "no karma onus", if I'm moderated down?
factor 966971: 966971
Computers use base 2 because it is the most stable detectable base. You can always detect an on-off set of states even if you have a lot of degradation of the signal. Computers don't even use tri-state because it isn't reliable enough. You honestly think computers will move to a ten-state system? That's bordering on analog right there. Short of a very fundamental change in the way computers operate from using electrical signals to something else, that's not very likely.
More to the point, while quantum computing has a slight potential for doing this, you still need to have some sort of electrical interface with the outside world to make it useful... which will probably still be in binary. Thus, moving to base-10 computing would require something even more drastic than the introduction of quantum computing....
Base 2 computing isn't likely to go away for a very, very long time.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What about modems? I remember owning a 28.8k modem. Turns out, that means it operated at 28,800 bits per second, not 29,491.2 bits per second as the "computer" definition of kilo would imply. In fact seems to be this way, Ethernet is also using mega and giga to mean base-10 defined. How about your processor? Best as I can tell those are also using decimal notation. A 3GHz processor is 3*10^9 Hz, not 3*2^30 Hz. Seems like in the computer context, sometimes kilo is 1024, sometimes it isn't. That's the problem.
A dollar isn't an SI unit of measurement either, but when the realtor tells me the house is $1M, I assume $1,000,000, not $1,048,576. Since a dollar is 2^2 quarters it is not a base 10 operation, thus I should expect this, correct?
All that we've accomplished here is forced Seagate (and friends) to put more fine print on their boxes qualifying exactly how many bytes are on the hard drive, and possibly caused them to lose a lot of money. Meanwhile nobody was really misled or damaged in any tangible way. Way to screw America!
Because not everything is measured binary. 100Mb Ethernet is 100 million bits per second (100*10^6). I don't care if you don't like it, I don't care if you'd rather it was 104,857,600 (100*2^20) bits per second, the standard is defined, that's how it is and how it shall be. Network speeds, going all the way back to the modem days, are done decimal. Not sure why, but that's how it is. As such using the SI prefixes makes sense. As such if you simply have two prefixes, correctly defined, there isn't any confusion. You see G(whatever) you know it's 10^9, you see Gi(whatever) you know it's 2^30. It's always clear which is being talked about since both are used in computers.
Then I've little use for it. Turns out my computer is also much better at dealing with large lists of numbers, not so good at dealing with graphs. I don't give a shit, I like graphs, the computer will display graphs or I'll get a different one. A computer is a tool to help us, humans, do our work better. It is designed to accommodate our likes and needs, not its own. This is more true as time goes on. You think a GUI is the ideal way from a computer's point of view to interact? Hardly. However it is much better for us humans, so we'll teach the computer to do it.
Any modern system and do a 2-10 conversion with no problem, as often as required.
Big thanks to the power industry for not selling me kilowatts by the 1013 watts or something. I am sure there are some almost-1000 numbers that are really neat for measuring 110v/60Hz power, but the electricity industry measures with 1000 watt per kilowatt. Why? Because it makes sense for everybody!
Sure, so we use binary numbers a lot. That does NOT allow us to choose our own wacky redefinition of kilo. I can assure you that no other industries have machines and calculations that always come out in nice little 1000s. You just don't know about it, because they are considerate enough to report it to you in units of 1000 anyway.
1024 - Because IT people care about a binary fetish instead of ordinary people... (No, this is not a good thing.)
I lost my sig.
Parent allows us to: Blame Windows! Yay!
;) Ordinary people have no need to relate to base 2 systems and the OS should report disk size in units of 1000.
Oh, and he also had a point, too, if you care about that
My family will never understand why a disk may have 6,92GB (7,434,502,144 bytes) free. And they would not apreciate an explanation about how neat that is if you suddenly need to... er... quicksort their free space or something. I mean, is there anything useful AT ALL about reporting HD size to the end-user in base2, except showing them how inconsiderarte technologists we are?
I lost my sig.
I would market my drives as GENUINE gigabytes. Exactly 1.000.000.000 bytes or more per megabyte. I am sure they will be able to continue using these measures, and I fully support it.
(Yeah, I know base 2 is handy, but it's my job to do that calculation. No need to bother the end user with it.)
I lost my sig.
So ... will that be 6200000 rebates, or 6501171 rebates?
Didn't we go throught he same crap a few years ago with monitor sizes, that led to monitor specs needing to be "actual size" rather than some "actual viewable size" in the (very) fine print?
All that's going to happen here, is that drive manufacturers will be forced to dial down their figures a bit, to comply with what *everybody except them* calls a gigabyte...
Flash in the pan, folks... nothing to see here other than a trend towards not getting a drive that's actually only 90% in "real life" of what it's advertised as.
Personally never had a problem with it, tbh, being something 99.999% of us knew about and lived with.
people on the street also tend to round.
My answer would be 'slightly less than a megabyte', or 'a megabyte' if I'm in a hurry.
That's why this took so long to become a problem - even 7% difference can be explained by rounding, but when you start approaching TB levels, it's significant enough to matter.
I don't read AC A human right
Humans work in powers of ten. Computers should accommodate humans, not the other way round. RAM comes in powers of two for technical reasons, but nothing else in a computer which the user is exposed to uses powers of two. It is not natural for disks to use powers of two (except for the bus) and certainly not natural for the human interface to information about a disk to use powers of two. Using a standardised prefix (giga) to mean something other than 10^9 is the fudging of a definition.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
I lost my sig.
Waiter! Bring me a 100 TERABIT drive, please. And a toilet plunger, - I'm gonna flush this fucking "7-bit ascii / 8-bit byte / 2-byte unicode character" stinking pile of shit we have as a standard down into the sewage where it belongs!
I lost my sig.
You know, there is a reason IT people are considered geeks and oddballs.
Trying to push our binary fetish down the throats of others instead of using a standard approach...
I lost my sig.
Oh, and you know that 2mbps ADSL line I have? How much time to fill a 2GB drive?
That's why we have standards. The above is supposed to be a simple mental arithmetic... We fucked it up, guys.
I lost my sig.
This is just another case of two jackasses (a pathetic consumer and an even more pathetic lawyer) jerking things around, and a deranged court system allowing it. There's plenty of historical precedent for the way the drives were marketed.
While I'm glad we don't live in a perfect state of "buyer beware", the current nany state is even scarier.
I was around in the 90's when those bastard cheap hard drive companies decided to start measuring in base-10 instead of base-2. I complained bitterly at how crappy and cheap and market-speak it was.
Now, 10 years later, something finally happens, but it's too late for anything to change, any money to realistically be returned, or for us to go back to the old, proper way.
Ahhh, the sweet smell of justice....
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Well, this is a rather divisive issue, isn't it. Although I agree that HD manufacturers used powers of 10 to make a buck long ago, Mrs. Cho and her lawyer, Brian R. Strange of Strange and Carpenter, are greedy so-and-so's out to make a buck TODAY. And who pays that buck? Well, now that there's a precedent, and other drive makers are likely to follow, people who buy hard drives in the future (that's us) pay it. Of all the things non-geeks have trouble understanding about computers, this is hardly the most worthy of a lawsuit. So Mr. Strange, shame on you for your horrible abuse of the legal system and unwarranted attack on an outstanding company that provides great products to the marketplace (and yes, I am a Seagate customer, not an employee, or stockholder, or P.R. rep).
For those of you who agree with me, please take the time to let Mr. Strange know what you think of his despicable actions. I couldn't find his direct email address, but the address posted under "Contact Us" on the Strange and Carpenter web site is: tjhood@strangeandcarpenter.com
What I don't get here is why didn't they argue significant figures? That way 1073741824 would be equal to 1000000000. Oh and remind me to sue my local bar next time they overpour my bourbon.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Can we now officially and formally declare the kibi/mebi/gibi prefix notation dead and buried? Nobody likes it, nobody uses it, and nobody wants it. Now, as of this ruling, nobody needs it either.
Good-bye and good riddance to the Gibibyte. Long live the Gigabyte!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Use KB MB GB TB etc for base 2 and kB mB gB tB for base 10. One would be the 'proper' computer term, the other would be the more 'generic' SI term. Of course confusing gb for GB would be huge mistake
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I had this brought up to me by my supervisor not long ago when we were trying to find the precise spot on a drive that an HFS+ partition began, so that we could properly replace it with 2 ext3 partitions without freaking out the software that was running on the machine. It turns out, software that's been out for a while already understands the distinction between MB and MiB, even if the people using the software do not.
I keep seeing on here that the (X)iB units are made fun of relentlessly in various public forums, but if it works, it works. In the case of precisely defining partitions in parted, the distinction works.
I think it's laughable that a technical community that is constantly adapting to new things and creating stuff faster than the rest of the world can keep up with is so incredibly resistant to a change that went into effect roughly ten years ago.
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
Then the OS is wrong, not the drive.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Kudos for the excellent point.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Exactly. Thats why I intend to sue Microsoft for lazy programing. By redefining "Giga" to mean 2^30 instead of 10^9 like the accepted notation, they have virtually robbed me of about 7% of my drive by understating the size of my files, etc.
The Kilo- Mega- Giga- etc prefixes were well defined before lazy programmers started substituting the faster for binary computers 2^10, 2^20, and 2^30 calculations for well established and easy for humans 10^3, 10^6, and 10^9 calculations. Why are you so willing to accept the OS's reinterpretation of these figures? The lawsuit against CRT Monitor manufacturers had merit, they measured corner to corner of the physical tube, and left off that almost 1" was covered by plastic an unusable. This had a serious economic impact on Apple in the early days, who sold their 14.1" visible monitor as a 14" monitor against competitors that sold the same thing as a 15" display (as a computer salesman in that period, I always had fun explaining that to customers...)
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
No no no... You don't expect "a lot more" than a gigabyte. You expect at minimum exactly one gigabyte. In the computer industry, a gigabyte is exactly 1024 megabytes, which each of which is exactly 1024 kilobytes, which in turn is exactly 1024 bytes. It doesn't matter what something "has always been" because in this context it means something different; they are domain-specific technical jargon which are well defined to be 2^30 bytes, 2^20 and so on.. So the common usage of "the SI-prefix G" really is not directly applicable. But to get to the point, if you tell someone they are getting a gigabyte and you knowingly only give then one billion bytes, then you are either incompetent or dishonest. So which is it, Seagate? Assholes or liars?
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"
A millionth is a micro, Greek letter micro, AKA mu, HTML entity µ One thousand meters is simply 1 km.
K is not a factor but a unit by itself: Kelvin, for temperature. Sigh.
Aphorisms don't fix code. (Bart Smaalders)
Bytes isn't a SI unit, so what the SI-prefix has always been has no relevance.
Thank you very much for the best slashdot laugh I've had all week (at least) :D
I had occasion to need all the bits on the drive.
Rebuilding a mirror and got a replacement 160G drive,with just that,160gigs, total space.
Whereas the drive that was the other 1/2 of the mirror was a 160G,usable space.
Just another online order away,mirror got fixed but not as soon as it could have been.
Now what do I do with this other drive?Buy another to match it for another mirror??
Still,that would have to be a new clean install.
I know,repartition?
I paid for 160, I should get 160.
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9... oops, ran out of numbers. I know! Let's assume there is a zero in front of the 9 like this: 09. So the front number goes from 0 to 1 and we reset the second number. We end up with 10.
Why 10? What's so special about it? Wouldn't 8, which is a power of 2, be more useful? Or some other base? Nope, we've got ten fingers and ten toes. We've got ten on the brain from a young age, hence my term "base-10 mind."
They chose 1,024 because it was the closest they could get with binary to 1,000, a number we are all comfortable with.
PMBjornerud said it best in his/her post:
It doesn't hurt computer scientists and programmers to say mebibyte instead of megabyte or gibibyte instead of gigabyte. It would solve the issue for everyone involved in that computer technology would accurately and unambiguously codify their distinct needs while everyone else would know exactly what we intend to signify. The only impediments are laziness and stubborness: resisting change for the sake of resisting change. There really isn't any other good reason not to switch other than, "We've always done it that way, and we don't want to change."
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
This is just assinine.
Kilo has always ALWAYS meant 1024 in computing.
What it means in any other context is IRRELEVANT.
We aren't talking about a billion granules of sugar.
We're talking about a particular technology that's
based on base 2 and base 16 numbers.
Seagate KNEW they were perpetrating a fraud. It was
their intended outcome. They thought they could get
one over on the clueless not aware that computers
are not based on base 10.
Seagate intended fraud even if what they did isn't
defined in criminal law as such. They meant to mislead
people and give them less than what people were expecting.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bullshit.
ALL the drive manufacturers intended to defraud everyone.
Law & Order finally did what it was supposed to. It slapped
down those who apparently can't work or play well with others
and try to take advantage of everyone else.
Caveat emptor is not acceptable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I understand your sentiment, but my point is not BS. They (on the box) state 1 MB is 1,000,000 bytes. It's not "right" but it is not fraud either. It is the fine line those marketing asshats walk every day.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/giga
By redefining "Giga" to mean 2^30 instead of 10^9 like the accepted notation, they have virtually robbed me of about 7% of my drive by understating the size of my files, etc
How, exactly, have they robbed you? Your files occupy exactly the same number of sectors and tracks on the disk, regardless of whether the operating system displays them in Bytes, or Kilobytes (/1024), Megabyres (/1048576). On Windows, look at a file in the directory listing, and it shows binary kilobytes/megabytes. But right-click/Properties and it shows you the exact number of bytes as a decimal number. Chosing one display or another does not alter the actual storage capacity of your drive at all - only your own perception of it.
It's like operating systems (like Unix and Windows/XP) that store the system date in GMT rather than local time. The time signature of a file does not change, regardless of what symbolic representation you choose to display it in.
Humans work in powers of ten.
Actually, this is merely a cultural thing. Many cultures find it convenient to use base 10 because (most) people have 10 fingers to count with. However, the human brain does not inerently favor decimal arithmetic. Some cultures have used other bases in the past (for example, Babylon used base 60 - and you can see how pervasive that was, since we still use such numbers in circular measurement). I also believe that Unicode includes some number systems that are in base 12 (although I might be mistaken).
Eric
http://www.mapelves.com/ and http://www.windychat.com/
Exactly. Note I said "Virtually" and not "actually" or "Literally". They gave me the perception my files were smaller than they were by misrepresenting their size as smaller than they truly were. This led me ("me" being a fictional idiot who felt the need to sue honest law abiding hard drive manufacturers for misrepresentation when the used the common base 10 numerology instead of the esoteric base 2 numerology) to believe a 200,000,000,000 byte drive would hold my 199 "gigabytes" of data, when in fact, it wouldn't.
The grandparent claims the hard drive manufacturers misled the public when they used the standard notation instead of the binary notation. I disagree, I've known for over 25 years the OS is the one miscalculating the size, and think this case would only have a basis if Seagate were the only company using decimal representations, when in reality every manufacturer used this method for calculating disk size and has for decades. The OS often also grabs a portion of the disk for partitions, FAT, and other tables, (up to 12% in some cases), should they take that into account hen giving sizes as well?
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Right.
I have always been disgusted by the disingeunousness of memory manufacturers by inflating the sizes of their devices, but at least they DO actually put a note on the side of the box stating what they mean. The fact that they rely on the fact that most people can't be bothered to read the fine print may be despicable, but hardly actionable.
(And this choice is deliberate - they KNOW that their disks will be used on operating systems that use binary metrics to display disk sizes, yet they always use decimal metrics themselves. This has irritated me in much the same way that my entire life, grocery stores have sold hot dogs in packages of 10 and hot dog buns in packages of 8, knowing full well that these products were designed to be used together).
I also always used to hate the fact that RAM was typically measured in bytes, wheras ROMs were typically measured in bits - making them seem to be 8x as large unless you paid attention. This was most notable on video game cartridges, where 128KB games were called "Mega cartridges" because they had a megabit of data.
(And let's not get into the confusion between KBps/MBps and Kbps/Mbps for measuring bandwidth...)
> It doesn't hurt computer scientists and programmers to say mebibyte instead of megabyte or gibibyte instead of gigabyte
Um, YES IT DOES FREAKING HURT. "Gibibyte" has got to be the #1 asswipe word I've ever heard in my life.
Hello, how many Gibibytes is that drive? I DARE you to go into a store and ask that. They'll think you're a retard with a speech impediment. And if you said gibibyte, you would be.
Whoever invented these stupid-ass terms probably thought they were solving this whole 1000 vs 1024 problem. Too bad that asshole hadn't ever left his parents' basement.
nt
Which is why I am not a computer scientist--or maybe I don't know these things because I'm not a computer scientist.
I still maintain that if we _could_ move away from binary, it would have some serious benefits.
What about optical processing/storage/transmission? Would that work?
By the way, though, note that I do not, and would not, suggest a move to base-10. base 4, 8, 16, or whatever worked within the system would be my preference. With that in mind, base 10 would make the whole argument about hdd space obsolete.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Well said! Let's all start using bits. It makes the recent misleading "1 terabyte" hard drives seem less amazing. After all, that's just 8 terabits. I think I'll wait for 10. That's a much more pleasing number and more deserving of attention.