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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.
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]
1 GB (gigabyte) = 10^9 B
1 GiB (gibibyte) = 2^30 B
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.
Do your research - your point is pretty much ass-backwards. The manufacturers are quoting their sizes in gigabytes, which are SI units defined as 10^9 bytes. A gibibyte is the familiar 2^30, 1024MB unit that we all associate as being a gigabyte.
I recently got a class action settlement in the mail offering money for memory that I overpaid for back in the early 2000s. The catch is, to receive anything, I need to provide detailed information about how much memory I bought from what merchant, the brand and how much I paid. To receive the hard drive settlement, they want the same info (serial number, proof of purchase, name of retailer, price paid, etc).
I have those receipts... somewhere. Who really keeps receipts for computer parts going back a couple generations though? As an individual, I doubt the money I would receive is worth the hassle of digging up the receipts. Sure, MegaCorp may have purchased 1,000 units and have the receipt of that order and will get a hefty sum at 7% for their trouble, but most people are just going to get a couple dollars.
I'm not sure why they don't offer a token minimum amount for those who can't provide receipts (I don't see all 300 million people in the US clamoring to get a $10 check). Of course, like most class action suits, this was probably just a way for a law firm to cash in on a settlement (they get a cool $1.8 million while you get some free backup software or a couple dollars).
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Yes, cash seems like a good option, but the problem is that Seagate defines the dollar as having 93 cents.
The problem is that you can't say "gibibyte" without sounding like a fucking tool. :)
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.
Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither
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.
Wikipedia notes its techie-colloquial usage, and states that it is incorrect according to the SI/metric standard.
Too bad we're "techies" and not scientists. Also too bad we don't use the metric system in the USA. As a matter of fact, we wouldn't touch it with a 3.04800 meter pole.
and some lawyer is going to be flushing the money on hot cars and girls or boys.
Here is your $5.99.
By the way.. did we mention our $5.99 price increase on our drives?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
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.
"In its out-of-court settlement, Seagate proposed to pay $1000000 in damages. When the plaintiffs signed off on the agreement, Seagate lawyers indicated that this was a binary figure, paid the plaintiffs sixty-four dollars in cash and departed, apparently in some haste."
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
i think Newegg can add a "class-action lawsuit" button next to the rebate button, so they can help their customers use their money responsibly. it's the only place i buy my stuff from, and they would have proof of purchase information on file. heck, they can be like Steve Jobs, and just credit me for more purchases from their store!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
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...
" 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.
I understand that a "gigabyte" of RAM is 2^30 bytes, but that's just because memory addresses come in powers of two. I don't expect bytes on a hard disk to be counted in powers of two, because there is no need for them to be counted that way. But apparently there are some bargain-hunters and their lawyers who have a more self-serving style of counting.
Oh well.
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.
Maxtor became crap shortly after the Quantum merger. They adopted Quantum's ways and their "No Quibble" warranty service went out the window shortly after the merger.
Getting a replacement drive could take weeks if they didn't have your capacity in stock. Maxtor would just upgrade you and send you a drive right away. Sadly, most other driver manufacturers followed their lead. When Maxtor shortened their warranty to 1 year, Western Digital followed and others followed. Seagate started offering longer warranties and reversed this trend. What was worse was Western Digital would insist on going by the manufacture date instead of the purchase date for the start of the warranty. I'd have to complain to a supervisor before they'd admit to allowing a pad of 90 days. This was the best they'd do no matter what your receipt showed as the purchase date.
I just had to have my Western Digital notebook drive replaced. It took them over a week to tell me I'd have to wait two more weeks for a replacement drive due to inventory not being available. The warranty was useless and I had to go out and buy another drive from another manufacturer. From now on, I plan to stick with Seagate.
And, I too, will be declining any settlement owed to me for the Seagate drives I've purchased. Seagate is the best of the bunch and they don't deserve this.
If a megabyte is counted as 1024 kilobytes how's your math working? Still 8 bits to a byte right? I mean I thought a byte was a byte, are you telling me a hard disk follows different conventions? Because last time I checked binary units were pretty stable, not a lot of 'wiggle room' in the interpretation.
Quack, quack.
I received an offer letter for employment many moons ago that stated that my salary would be "$65k" - When they tried to pay me $65,000 a year there was hell to pay (so as to speak). We settled on $66,560 :-)
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
- 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:Actually, to a scientist, '1K' would be very fucking cold (to the point where the nerves probably wouldn't be quick enough to even transmit the coldness info to his brain). '1k' is a thousand. :)
Apparently you didn't understand what we are talking about here, and what the parent argued.
The SI-prefix G has always been 1,000,000,000. When you buy a hard drive with one gigabyte of storage capacity, it will always have a little bit more than this, due to cylinders/sectors/platters rounding. When they sell a hard drive with 500 gigabyte, it will have slightly more than 500,000,000,000 bytes. No one is trying to fool anyone here.
Now, if you go to the store and want to buy one gigagram of sugar, you expect to get no less than 1,000,000,000 grams. Anything else would be cheating. But when you go to the store and want to buy one gigabyte of storage, you suddenly expect to get a lot more?
c++;
The whole hard drive industry quotes storage capacities in base 10 SI units. Just because some ignorant consumers don't understand the difference between a Gigabyte and a Gibibyte doesn't mean that Seagate should have to pay for their ignorance. The customer got what he paid for. He should instead sue Operating System vendors for calculating storage capacities in base 2 and reporting as GB instead of either calculating in decimal or reporting as GiB.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
They were using the correct measurement. Why don't you sue Intel and 3COM because your 100Mbps ethernet card is actually 100,000,000 million bits per second.
The problem is some OS vendors, like Microsoft, incorrectly report the drive size using a strange base-1024 system. While this system might make sense for RAM which due to technical reasons must be a power of 2. (due to binary encoding for the addressing and inability to support "gaps")
Also it's not false or misleading if everyone knows what is being done. And did you overlook that * on the box that says "* 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes."
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I like how your username sort of matches with your ID. :P
A bit off-topic, but I did post with no karma bonus.
No existe.
Oops, apparently I didn't.
No existe.
I'd love to get what I supposedly deserve, only I don't keep receipts for hard drives I bought over a year ago. What's wrong with going by serial and date of manufacture?
The 75GXP refund bit me (I had the receipts for some reason) because I bought OEM- bastards. I've bought mostly retail seagates (about 15 maybe in the window for the suit) but I don't have the receipts.
A few will benefit, the rest get tossed.
When's the lawsuit for that? At least LCD's are (mostly) accurate in their size ratings.
The more of this stuff the better. IT is even worse than the car in industry in exaggerating its products performance.
Plus I've seen "128MB" flash drives that were 128,000,000 bytes..
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
There wasn't an ambiguity before hard disk manufacturers decided to invent one.
Yes, there was an ambiguity, and it started with marketing people. Back in the Early Eighties, in the days when music didn't suck, when the 6502 microprocessor ruled supreme in the personal computer arena, that this trouble started. Prior to this time, it was universally accepted that in the computer world K=1024. The 6502 microprocessor, found in the Apple II, the Commodore PET, the Atari 400/800, and a host of other machines, had a 16 bit address bus which means it was capable of addressing 64K of memory. In fact, that's the basis of the name Commodore 64.
Now somewhere along the line, some marketing bonehead read that 64K meant 65536 bytes, and thought "If we use K=1000, like the science nerds instead of K=1024 like the computer geeks, then we can say our machines have 65K instead of 64K. The sheeple buying these widgets will buy ours instead". And it worked. Sheeple bought the more expensive Commodore64 that had "over 65K" instead of the cheaper Commodore64 with only 64K, not knowing that they were being fleeced. Soon everyone was marketting their 64K machines as having 65K. These machines were rarely sold with hard drives. And when they were, the K from the manufacturer was 1024 bytes, but the K from the marketer was 1000.
It got worse when the IBM, Amiga, Mac, and the Atari ST lines hit the market. These machines could deal in Megabytes. The field was muddied by the folks saying a megabyte was 1000K, instead of 1024K, and further muddied by the crowd saying that 1K was 1000 instead of 1024. So, the megabyte came in three sizes, 1,000,000 bytes, 1,024,000 bytes, and it's true size, 1,048,576 bytes.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
A Byte is not an accepted SI unit of measurement therefore there is not a reasonable expectation that a gigabyte be 1 billion bytes. Since a byte is 2^3 bits to begin with its is even more unacceptable to think of as a base 10 operation. If seagate was advertising 8 Gigabits instead of 1 Gigabyte that would be more acceptable. 1 Gigabyte has always been accepted to mean 2^30 Bytes. 1 gigabit has always been 10^9 bits. They could have advertised as 1 Billion Bytes as well. You can not change the accepted notation just because it suits you. A mile is 5280 feet if you are in a car but 1852 meters if you are in a boat. Context matters.