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

Direct Link to claims

[micksam7]

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]

Re:Direct Link to claims

[houstonbofh]

cash or software, cash claim only if bought before 2006 & you have proof-of-purchase. 5% of what you paid

The mail in form also allows you to use your drive serial number as proof if you do not have proper documentation.

SI units

[Anonymous Coward]

1 GB (gigabyte) = 10^9 B
1 GiB (gibibyte) = 2^30 B

Re:SI units

[darthflo]

Everyone else except them uses KB/MB/TB/etc in a consistent - if not SI-compliant - fashion.

Bullshit. Remember 4.8 kbps modems which managed to transfer 4800 bps? What's the throughput of what's commonly referred to as Gigabit Ethernet, while we're on it? 1024 Mibps or more like 1'000'000'000 bps? What about an 1.5 Gbps SATA link? How many Pixels in a Megapixel? How many lomaniacs in a Megalomaniac?

Re:SI units

[redhog]

No, not RAM. Anything you _address_. You don't address the 412th cycle in the CPU frequence, you don't address the 1201st byte in transmission speed, etc. You address RAM content, and disk content and ports and hosts on the internet. All such addresses are stored as binary numbers inside the computer, and can thus address two to the power of number of bits in the address numbers of positions (bytes, hosts, bits, whatever).

Definitions

[mduke]

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.

Re:Ahh, another valueless settlement.

[__aajfby9338]

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."

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.

Re:Think this will set precedent?

[darthflo]

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.