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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."
Wow, I'm surprised that actually went through, if only because the court systems seem so broken. Hopefully, other manufacturers will get the hint and start changing their plans. I could just see this going after other manufacturers too, who insist on using smaller sizes for their measurements to seem bigger.
Seriously, the blame could just as easily be laid at the feet of the OS developers. There is a long standing history of disk manufacturers using base 10 counting numbers. It would not be so horribly difficult for the OS developers to conform to the base 10 measurement. I mean what next are the consumers going to sue because the formatting and allocation tables take up room? or perhaps because it hides space for virtual memory? seriously. come on people.
Regardless of whether the IT sector is _technically_ in the wrong it's commonly accepted that in this area we work with powers of two. The fact that people have to explicitly explain this fact shows that everyone expects it to be that way. The HDD manufacturers damn well know this and fairly blantantly use measurements which would commonly be interpreted more favourably.
yeah pretty worthless, I've bought $1000 worth of drive from them, but that's after jan 1 2006. Even if if it was before that, I would have to file 10 seperate claims for ~$5 each. Meanwhile the cocksucking trial lawyers get a cool 1.8mn in cash.
Seriously - class action lawsuits are utterly worthless. "Whoops we ripped you off by conspiring to raise memory prices tenfold. Here's a 2 dollar coupon that expires the day we get around to mailing it out and is only good at a single retailer in northern alaska. "
Seriously - How many people here paid nearly a grand for 32 meg SIMMS? 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."
"Oh yeah our batteries in our ipods are horribly defective here everyone who spent $300 on this shitty self-destructing rev of hardware and can cough up documentation gets 2 free songs on our own music store."
I'd really prefer the courts just fine the fuck out of the companies and it goes to something worthwhile - letting them use legal judgements as cheap advertising is just bullshit.
Yes, but no one uses the *bi- prefixes, because they sound stupid, and make one sound stupid for trying to use them. The word "gigabyte" has meant 1,073,741,824 bytes in common usage for over thirty years. So, to steal an apparantly legitimate proof of factuality, the consensus among IT professionals is that a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. If consensus among professionals in a field can make something a fact in any one field, it can make it a fact in every field.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
This says it perfectly.
RAM manufacturers do it correctly, and Application Vendors and Operating System Vendors have been doing it this way for DECADES. SI units be damned, this is the way it has always been and there is no reason for it to be changed.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
" When referring to RAM sizes and file sizes, it traditionally has a binary definition, of 1024 bytes. For every other use, it means exactly 1000 bytes. In order to address this confusion, currently all relevant standards bodies promote the use of the term "gibibyte" for the binary definition."
Seems to me that since hard drives' primary function is storing files, that hard drive capacity should use the same unit of measurment that file size does, no? Doesn't that make simple sense? So if file sizes use 1024 rather than 1000, then hard drive capacity should as well.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
In the mid-1990s, one marketing dweeb at a low-end hard drive manufacturer (I want to say Maxtor but don't recall for sure) convinced his company to start defining 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes. It let them sell a smaller (and thus cheaper to manufacture) drive while labeling it as the same capacity as everyone else's drives. The others resisted for about a year, then gave in and started mis-labeling their drives. IBM was the last holdout, I think they went for 3 years selling bigger drives than everyone else labeled with the same capacity. Eventually they gave in too, shortly before selling their hard drive division to Hitachi.
Around 1998, the international standards bodies mandated that MB = 1,000,000 and GB = 1,000,000,000, while MiB = 1,048,576 and GiB = 1,073,741,824. But like metric in the U.S., these units have never really caught on in the computer industry. Personally I can see the standards bodies' point, but they're going to have to collaborate with OS, memory, hard drive, and other computer hardware manufacturers to get the change implemented. They can't just stand on a pedestal mandating that this change be made, and expect it to happen.
The whole fiasco is an example of a class of situations I haven't found a name for but which is similar to the Tragedy of the Commons. In these situations, one member of the group does something which gives him an advantage of the others. The others then follow suit to remain competitive, and in doing so eliminate the advantage. The end result is that the situation is now identical to what it was before the change (everyone's 500 GB drives are the same size), but now everybody is worse off because of the change (1 GB on a drive does not equal 1 GB in memory). Other situations within this class include campaign spending in politics (everyone has to spend more on advertising each year just to stay even with everyone else), and net neutrality (if everyone pays the Telecos more money for priority, they have gained nothing because the total bandwidth hasn't increased, and are now losers because they're paying more for the same bandwidth).
However, the various SI prefixes -- kilo, mega, giga, exa, and others -- were overloaded by the computer industry to refer to powers of two ("kilo" = 2**10, "mega" = 2**20, "giga" = 2**30) which were "pretty close" to their SI counterparts.
This has actually caused some confusion as computer people speaking of "kilo" this and "mega" that have worked with scientists who have always used the traditional SI meanings. These differences in interpretation can mean your chemical process doesn't work, the patient dies, you miss Jupiter, etc.
To help redress this problem, a new set of prefixes have been coined to refer to powers of two. These new prefixes have seen uneven but increasing adoption in the industry (if you have a recent Ubuntu/Debian release, run the command ifconfig -- the byte counts have the new prefixes).
So, the hard drive makers have been using the SI meanings for "giga" and, in case there was any confusion, explicitly printed in their literature, "One gigabyte is equal to 1000000000 bytes."
So, at first reaction, I think Seagate got screwed here. This makes me wonder if there aren't other layers of nuance that came out in court, but are lost in these stories.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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.
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 can see the technical merit in using the Ki/Mi/Gi prefix instead of K/M/G, I object to it for the simple reason that kibibyte, mibibyte and gibibyte are stupid sounding words and I refuse to use them for that reason alone.
It might be, for a newcomer, initially confusing that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes instead of 1000 bytes, but the original scheme is a consistent exception. The powers of 2 apply to bytes and only bytes, nothing else. 1Km = 1000 meters. 1KW = 1000 Watts. 1KB = 1024 bytes. 1 KN = 1000 Newtons. Not completely uniform, but there is no ambiguity.
On the other hand, if someone came up with a set of power of 2 prefixes that didn't suck, I'd happily switch.
The problem is that a 2^k organization of bytes is fundamental to the way computers operate. It can't be changed to a power-of-ten unit just because it is "more convenient to work with" as the SI folks want. You can't realistically design a RAM chip with 1000 bytes of memory. You could do it, but you'd end up building one with 1024 bytes of memory and just burning out the last 24 cells. Ditto for all other forms of electronic storage, including the caches on hard drives. Only magnetic and optical storage have the luxury of defining units in non-power-of-2 ways, and yet they generally do not, choosing to standardize on 512-byte blocks primarily because if they didn't, the VM system's paging path would be heinously inefficient.
So we have a choice: we can either standardize on one unit---the base-2 definition of a gigabyte---or we can standardize on two units---one for RAM and one for hard drives---or we can foolishly standardize on the base-10 definition and have RAM chips described as 1.074 GB. I, for one, can't imagine that last choice being too popular, and the second choice (the status quo) is sufficiently confusing to an average layman that it really doesn't work, either. Thus, the only -reasonable- choice is to standardize on base-2 definitions of these units. There's a reason the standards were bent a bit fifty years ago. The SI units just don't work. They can't work. They will never work. And the sooner we stop trying to force a base-10 unit of measurement into a base-2 world---the sooner we can dispose of this fundamentally flawed view that everything must be in base 10---the sooner we can resume actually getting things done instead of quibbling over crap like this that was set in stone before most folks on Slashdot were even born.
Put another way, it's 9 years later, and the term kibibyte is still almost universally guaranteed to get you modded "troll" in any computing forum. Maybe it's type for the SI folks to realize that perhaps the reason their standard has been near-universally rejected in computing circles for almost a decayear is that it is fundamentally brain damaged from a practical use perspective.... It makes about as much sense if the SI had standardized base-10 units of time other than the second. Kiloweeks, anyone? Decidays? The SI folks wisely realized that moving time to a base 10 unit was not practical because the natural division of days into years could never be forced into base-10 units comfortably. Instead, they acknowledge the usefulness of these non-SI units as acceptable for use in spite of their non-base-10 nature. The same is true for computing, and they would be wise to acknowledge that the same fundamental problems hold true in this area.
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Ok, there's people everywhere in here saying it's stupid to say 1GB = 1024 MB, instead use GiB, blah blah, but I have an honest question: if everyone did, for whatever reason, use GiB and MiB and whatnot, of what use would MB and GB be? None, right? No one in their right mind would ever measure units on binary hardware in powers of ten. Just like I don't measure grams of soup or whatever in powers of two. I guess what I'm saying is if the switch to GiB and MiB was made in earnest then GB and MB would be utterly, completely useless -- and I see that as an argument that we might as well just use GB and MB, since it involves no conflict, fewer meaningless terms, and a more intuitive, uh, interface, if you will.
While he was a bit harsh, the 'gibi' 'mibi' 'mabi' and what not are NOT accepted units of measure irregardless of what any organization (even a 'standards' organization)says.
The key word word is accepted.
Computers work in base 2 natively and when the field was first started and the closest prefixes for base 2 'round' numbers in that base were adopted by the vast majority.
Now this was and is a bit of a kludge, but it's was nearly universal in use (and still dominant) and anyone who was serious about learning computers learned this fairly early on.
This same numbering scheme continued well into the era of commodity parts including retail hard drives until some nitwit realized they could make more money by selling according to the base 10 numbering system definitions which are smaller.
The real truth here is that what the hdd makers did was attempt to deliberately create a false impression of size by relying on the fact the for computers mega meant 2^20 and yet changing what they meant by it (after years of using the de-facto standard).
Mycroft
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