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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
- 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: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++;
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
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.