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: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.