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Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the making-things-right dept.

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."

5 of 780 comments (clear)

  1. Cash or Backup? by calebt3 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.

  2. Re:Misleading by being correct? by hitchhacker · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Indeed. the summary is incorrect. 1GB == 10^9 bytes vs. 1GiB == 2^9 bytes. This isn't new people.

    -metric

  3. Re:Think this will set precedent? by eldepeche · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I can't convert from 1Gb to a kilometre Yeah, and I can't convert from a hogshead to a fathom. Shut the fuck up.

  4. Re:SI units by Kludge · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    The fact that people have to explicitly explain this fact shows that everyone expects it to be that way.


    "Everyone"?? If you asked 98% of people how many bytes there are in a gigabyte, they would not be able to tell you. Of the 2% that could, 98% of those would say "a billion", not "1.07 billion".
    A very small fraction of computer geeks in the population would say "2^30".

    SI units be damned, this is the way it has always been and there is no reason for it to be changed.


    No! SI units have been around a lot longer than computers have, and just because a few come-lately computer nerds have started abusing and misusing SI units, is no reason to drop their real meaning. Science is exact. Giga means 10^9 period. If "computer scientists" want to consider themselves real scientists they need to get with the f---ing program.
  5. Re:SI units by ceeam · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Cock. Suck it.

    Really - except in HDD marketing is there any use for 10^x measurement of bytes? And no - if you say that SI should be uniform I don't buy it - SI prefixes only measure continuos (better word?) values, not discrete things like bytes and bits. You can't have 1.3932 bytes can you? And GiBi is so gay on many levels - for once - what's that mixing greek and latin. Why Gi - just because it's _close_ to Giga of 10^9? Etc etc. Then there's the issue of history and culture.

    Now that HDD manufacturers acknowledge that their Gigabyte is not _the_ proper Gigabyte can we stop this XxBi bullshit? Pretty please?