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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."
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
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.
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
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.
That was a fire at a factory which made the epoxy resin used to encapsulate ICs. This wasn't "special glue just for memory ICs"; it was the black plastic stuff molded around each IC on the SIMM (or any other kinds of ICs with plastic packages, for that matter). Without that plastic overmold to protect the bond wires and support the leadframe, the ICs can't be handled, shipped, soldered down, etc. That fire messed up the whole electronics industry for a while. I'm not saying that the memory suppliers didn't gouge anybody (I have no information either way), but the resin factory fire really was a big deal. It caused problems at my company at the time, which made ICs used in hard disk drives.
The catch for one of the most recent DRAM settlements (pricefixing; Rust Consulting) was that you had to purchase memory directly from the manufacturer. If you were a consumer, this was unlikely unless you bought directly from Micron/Crucial. I put in a CS ticket with Crucial, and received a copy of my invoices for the desired time period (about $400 worth). The settlement terms was compensation on a pro-rata basis; given the amount of memory sold during that time period vs the settlement sum, I believe it worked out to about 10% for Crucial. Still waiting on my check, so I can't confirm.
Your description seems to be a hybrid of the tragedy of the commons and the Red Queen
I say we call this hybrid theory the Tragedy of the Queen.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Drive manufacturers are in a position to make the much easier fix though. Changing OSes to report base-10 sizes, or to keep the existing sizes with the *iB notation requires changes from every OS manufacturer, and suddenly leaves them inconsistent with older versions of their products.
Whereas, for storage companies, it's a simple matter of changing the labeling and packaging. A switch to only using the base-2 sizes (my personal favorite) would also probably mean that the drive companies would start subtly altering drive sizes so they wouldn't be selling "85.7 GB" drives and would instead align neatly on a round GB number (which is actually incrementally harder to do now, because drives already are organized with power-of-2 blocks). Otherwise, they could simply list both sizes on the packaging, or include something to the effect "your computer will report this drive as having a capacity of X".
Really, the problem now with the MiB, KiB units is that people in general aren't aware that these are any different than MB and KB, and would likely only increase confusion. Another unit distinction that's still causing confusion is illustrated by your last line (comparing GB's with Gb's).
GB is gigabtye, where Gb is gigabit. So it's very easy to compare these, take Gb's and divide by eight: ta-da, GB. Another confusion taken advantage, this time, mostly by the Internet industry. Modem companies quickly jumped on the terms "56K modem" and such, which helpfully obscure that the K is for kilobits (base-10 again), of course until your computer reports you transferring data at a maximum of something like 5 KB (not to mention physical line limits that further decreased the actual maximum).
Really, computer-related industries seem to like to sow confusion in the market. The distinctions don't matter as much with increased capacities (even though the distinctions themselves increase in size). Take as an example, say you have a file your computer reports is exactly 1.41 MB in size. Ideally, this should fit on a 1.44 MB disk (filesystem usage of the disk aside), but that 1.44 MB is really 1440 KB, where KB is the base-2 unit, or only 1.40625 "standard" MB.
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.
To the average person, the distinction between base-2 and base-10 is meaningless, yes. That doesn't mean, however, that they aren't being cheated. Their interface with the computer, when they examine a file, will tell them how large it is using base-2 units. Disk space requirements on the back of software packages are written in base-2 units. Everything they see is in base-2 units, so this is how they estimate their requirements of disk size. And then they find out that the disk is being sold using different units.
It's a confusing situation, and the disk manufacturers deliberately switched in order to take advantage of it.
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.
While I agree with you, and try to use Ki etc myself, I don't think this is a problem that can just disappear like that. People are used to thinking in terms of 1GB as ~1.1*10^9 bytes. They might not realise that they do, but they do. Changing perceptions is a long and slow process, and software manufacturers (the only people who can realistically change these perceptions) are reluctant to start because they fear confusing their users. They're probably right.
Since your post is written with about as much intelligence as one'd expect from a tree stump, I doubt you are going to grasp anything at all, but to try and help you anyway: Read what the U.S. gov't has to say about it. If that's too dry for you, this wikipedia article might be interesting, too.
WRONG. Use a modern Linux distro. You will find that many tools either use the binary prefixes or use SI-standard prefix usage.
Because HDD manufacturers ARE labeling their drives correctly. "Giga" means 10^9 in SI. It always has and always will. The computer industry usage has never been correct.
The disparity only grows as we go up in prefixes. 1TiB = 1.099TB. 1PiB = 1.125PB. 1PiB = 1.153PB.
Moreover, the non-SI use is ambiguous. A "1.44MB" floppy is neither 1.44MiB nor 1.44MB, it's 1 440 KiB. A "650MB" CD is 650MiB, but a 4.7GB DVD is 4.7GB.
GiB is NEVER ambiguous. If you want to keep using the power-of-two units, use the proper prefixes. IEEE, NIST, and the IEC encourage it.
Hard drives, flash storage, DVDs, Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, transfer rates (8Mbps = 8 000 000 bps), and everything else uses the standard SI prefixes.
Why should computer memory be the ONE EXCEPTION to the SI standard prefixes? We have binary prefixes. Use them if you want.
You are right that it's actually 1440KB but you're totally wrong about everything else. 720KB floppies were double sided and "double density". That means 80 tracks, 18 sectors per track, 256 bytes per sector - with the 2 sides you get 720KB. "high density" or "quad density" floppies were 36 sectors per track, doubling them up to 1440KB. This is equivalent to 1.40625MB.
Graham
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
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.
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