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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."
There is a precedent of sorts...back in the 80's at Kaypro, we had a customer threaten to sue us because some fool in marketing said that we had 65K of memory, and there was only 64K, of course. Management told him to take a hike. And that was the last we heard of him.
I must be eligible for at least $100 over all the Seagate gear I bought in that period, but it'll be a cold day on the sun before I demand money from any corporation for the ignorance of other people.
Seagate has produced great drives for a long time, and they've never strayed from industry standard definitions to advertise the storage capacity. Anyone taking advantage of this settlement is either morally dishonest or technologically incompetent.
Well, now someone needs to go after OS makers for "lying" because of all the wasted space depending on data block size. Sure, you can have a 1-byte file, but it'll use up 512 bytes or more space on the HD... So, which is it? Is it a 1-byte file, or really a 512-byte (or 1024 or 2048 or 4096 or...) file?
I have a 1TB HD, and, well, I want to be able to actually use every byte of it!!!
A gigabyte here, a gigabyte there, pretty soon we're going to be talking about some actual wasted disk space...
Lay the blame at os developers? How about you propose changing how computers fundamentally work then?
Oh wait, that is exactly what you are proposing. Do you know why a byte is 8 bits long? Yes it is arbitrary, but we are sort of stuck with the nomenclature now. Either memory (RAM) manufacturers are labeling their stuff right or wrong, or hard drive manufacturers are labeling their stuff right or wrong.
Most people seem to agree with the memory manufacturers however. Sure we could have all the os tools divide by 1000 for displays of size, but that only masks the issue. And as we get to larger storage will probably cause problems. Just think of when we have exabytes of storage and are approaching some limit we currently think is insanely high. This "little" difference becomes rather substantial. And with the future of storage leaning towards flash, which follows the powers of 2 a byte scheme, hard drives become even more the bastard child of computing.
Either hard drive manufacturers step into line with the rest of the computing world, or they learn their little trick isn't appreciated anymore. As silly as it seems it may be the only way to get this little annoyance of computing to go away.
PS: I do think people have sued about the formatting of a drive bit. Time for filesystems like zfs methinks.
I don't see why hdd manufactureres are the ONE single exception to this long standing rule, and SI units be damned.
Ever hear of a "1.44MB" floppy? How many bytes do you suppose it holds? That's right... it's a double-sided version of a "720kB" floppy, so it really holds 1440KiB... which, perhaps inevitably, people started calling "1.44MB", even though that "MB" is the bastard child of the decimal and binary kilobytes, 1024000 bytes.
Once that monstrosity caught on, I'm afraid we were doomed.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
- Operating systems/software
- Memory
- Flash storage (CF, etc)
- PROMs
- CD media
Base 10 (LAWSUIT TARGETS):- Evil, evil hard drives
- Bandwidth-related hardware:
- Line cards
- Ethernet interfaces
- Modems
- Your broadband provider's advertised line speeds
- DVD media
- HD-DVD media
- Blu-Ray media
- Most (not all) USB stick-style flash storage devices
- Digital cameras' resolution
- CPU clockrate (I thought the argument against base 10 was "computers" were natively base 2)
- Latency (opposite of kilo, of course -- 1millisecond is not 1/1024 second)
A weird hybrid between the two:- Floppy disks
Units of measurement that use an international SI standard's prefix to describe something "close enough" but not equal to said international SI standard's prefix:- byte
Units of measurement that use an international SI standard's prefix:Not that it's particularly relevant, but in the book "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, the characters used a timekeeping system where they talked about things like: "It'll take at least 10 Msec to get this done!" or "we've been travelling in hibernation for over 1Gsec! That's a long time!"
The reason was that everyone had been out in space for thousands of years. Only a tiny percentage of the human race still lived on a planet where 24 hours was a day or 365 days was a year. So instead they have a calender which starts at Jan 1, 1970 and is measured in seconds from that point on. (obviously a reference to the internal clock of computers which measure times from the epoch)
The book even included a chart at the beginning showing how megasecond, gigsecond, and terasecond values related to hours, days, and years. I actually think it's a wonderfully simple system which makes sense once you're off the earth.
Cow Cube