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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.
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: