Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Indeed. the summary is incorrect. 1GB == 10^9 bytes vs. 1GiB == 2^9 bytes. This isn't new people.
-metric
>>in actuality, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes
No. Giga is 10^9, so a GigaByte is 1,000,000,000 bytes. But we all know that computers work in base 2, not base 10. So Gibi is 2^30, so a GibiByte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. Seagate's advertising was completely truthful; the customers got however many GigaBytes they paid for. It's not Seagate's fault if the operating system the customer uses incorrectly reports GibiBytes as GigaBytes.
Si weenies need to get over it. Kilo, Mega, Giga etc. are all measures of a power of 2 in computing, and always will be. You don't get to redefine a term after half a century to fit your Si fetish, I'm afraid. It's not like it matters: I can't convert from 1Gb to a kilometre, so what different does it make if computers use a different base than real-world Si units? None at all, unless you're a hard-drive manufacturer I guess.
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.
"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".
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.
Well done for proving my fucking point, retard. You can't convert between two totally different measurements you say? Because the conversion is meaningless? Well shit, neither can I! So what fucking difference does it make to SI weenies if K, M & G mean 1000 or 1024 for computers?
tl;dr: NO U.
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?