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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."
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
You are buying the drive to store base 2 numbers, so why shouldn't the value be rated in terms of base 2?
Yes, cash seems like a good option, but the problem is that Seagate defines the dollar as having 93 cents.
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.
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. --
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).
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 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!
I was more upset when I ordered a case of hard drives -- the shipping container said "Quantity: 1K", and I only got 1000 hard drives, not the 1024 I was expecting.