Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives 780
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."
Re:Think this will set precedent? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:RTFM (Score:0, Interesting)
Next stupid lawsuit... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:Seems Silly to me (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Seems Silly to me (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:wow.... are you clueless! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:SI units (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the word 'Kilobyte' had established a consistent meaning of 1024 bytes long before Flash existed. All you are saying is that the Flash manufactures have succumbed to the same deceptive marketing tricks of the hard disk manufacturers. It is an abuse of language for marketing purposes, nothing else. So is using 'bits' in network speeds, it is purely so they can market a number that is 8 times bigger. If you are going to download files, then you want to know what the transfer speed is in units of the file size, which is bytes. But 2Mb/s looks way faster than 244KB/s, [*] so lets print that number on the box!
ISO tried to sort out the mess by defining new terms for the power of 2 prefixes, and it would have worked if they had chosen names that don't suck.
[*] I was debating exactly what number to put in there. I was tempted to put in 200KB/s, since that is probably a realistic peak transfer speed on a 2Mbit connection. But that is a silly suggestion - who would come up with the idea of actually putting a number on the box that is immediately useful to a consumer? Better to put in some technical nonsense that depends on using some weird definition of the units to get a bigger looking number!
Let's break down who's on what side here (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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:Re:wow.... are you clueless! (Score:2, Interesting)
Seagate don't deserve this. Hell, nobody doesn't deserve this (even if now when we reach 1TB, the difference between 10^12 and 2^40 is just a smidge under 10%
Re:SI units (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Think this will set precedent? (Score:2, Interesting)
Even in metric britain (Score:1, Interesting)
How many scientists are there in the world? Who needs to calculate how many 30cm tiles are needed to stretch 2km? OK, the calculation is easy. then again, how many 1ft tiles does it take to cover 20ftx10ft ceiling? Just as easy a calculation.
i hate these suits (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What about my 21" CRT with it's 19.8" screen? (Score:2, Interesting)
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..
Re:Think this will set precedent? (Score:3, Interesting)
just bought a "1TB External Hard Drive", formatted it and was delighted to find I had 920GB available.
I love being sold products with accurate packaging.
Imagine cars were sold like this? "Gas tank capacity: 50L", then you find out you can only put 42L in the tank..
I just bought a new ladder to clean my gutters.
The big colorful bold-face signs all over it say "20' Ladder", which should be plenty long.
After quite a bit of searching the sides of the ladder, I found the 2"x3" B&W sticker on the side that had product weight and dimensions including real height of a little less than 17'
The ladder assumes a 5'10 person on the highest safe rung with an additional 12" reach when calculating it's 20' length.
So, yeah... lots of this going around. Difference with hard drives is that it's been going on since day one, and most anyone with enough of a clue to install their own hard drive should reasonably know this...
Perhaps I can start a lawsuit because the last batch of 2x4's I bought at the lumber store was actually NOT 2x4 ?