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."

Comments

Re:SI units

[Kludge]

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.