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."

Think this will set precedent?

[Adradis]

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.

Re:

[DiSKiLLeR]

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.

I bloody well hope so.

Re:Think this will set precedent?

[Eivind]

The difference does however grow as capacity grows.

The difference between 2^10 bytes and 10^3 bytes is 2.4%. (kilobyte)

The difference between 2^20 bytes and 10^6 bytes is 4.9% (megabytes)

The difference between 2^30 bytes and 10^9 bytes is 7.4% (gigabytes)

The difference between 2^40 bytes and 10^12 bytes is 10% (terabytes)

In other words, treating 10^(3n) as equivalent to 2^(10n) makes less and less sense as the capacities go up.

Re:Think this will set precedent?

[tchuladdiass]

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.

Re:

[reezle]

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 ha

Re:Think this will set precedent?

[darthflo]

Since your post is written with about as much intelligence as one'd expect from a tree stump, I doubt you are going to grasp anything at all, but to try and help you anyway: Read what the U.S. gov't has to say about it [nist.gov]. If that's too dry for you, this wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] might be interesting, too.

Re:Think this will set precedent?

[db32]

I take offense to that. I have a very kind and polite tree stump in my front yard that is arguably much more intelligent than "vaginal_flatulance" has demonstrated themselves to be.

Re:

[darthflo]

That's great for you! I hope you, for one, welcome your kind and polite tree stump overlords.

RTFM

[Revotron]

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.

Re:

[Ledsock]

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.

Actually, 1 GiB=1024 MiB. That's the whole issue of this case. MB!=MiB, as with kB and KiB, and GB and GiB. The difference between a GB and a GiB is roughly 6.87%, yet when you hit the TB/TiB level, the difference is roughly 9.05%. The greater the prefix, the more the inconsistency between the two units of measurement. I view this case as preventative action for the soon coming terabyte and tebibyte hard drives. As sizes grow, so do our losses (although, technically, they are advertising correctly, an

Re:RTFM

[Mycroft_VIII]

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

Re:

[joeljkp]

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.

Binary prefixes are supported by the following professional organizations: IEEE, CIPM, SAE, NIST, CENELEC, and the European Union.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Adoption [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Mattintosh]

What's hilarious here is that most, if not all, of the supporters of SI+RetardedBi prefixes are pointing to what the US Government says about the "standard". Things to think about here include (but are not limited to):

1) The US Government is in the pocket of any company willing to pay up, including HDD manufacturers that ponied up a bit-o'-cash to get this "standardized".
2) This is made more hilarious by the fact that the US Government and its citizenry don't use SI units at all. Oh, except for 2-liter soda

Re:

[vux984]

Actually, most buses are rated in standard SI units, not base-2, this is because the "M" actually arrives by way of the clock speed rather than the storage size which is (often) bytes.

For example: consider AGP1x, which is rated at 266MB/s:

This is arrived at by multiplying: 66MHz clock x 4 byte data path (32 bits) = 266MB/s

(Note: actually 66 x 4 = 264, we get 266 due to round off error. The clock speed is more like to 66.6MHz than actually 66MHz. And 266MB/s is really just twice as fast as 133MB/s, which is

Re:

[2short]

Those are stupid words made up words too, but were made up by knowledgeable people with good intentions.

Re:Think this will set precedent?

[Harmonious Botch]

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.

Re:

[LodCrappo]

gee thanks for setting the purely crappiest standard in customer service.

Re:

[Selivanow]

It might not be "new" but it wasn't always this way. I do remember drives that were labeled in the "correct" binary values. Of course it has been a while, the last drive I can absolutely remember is my WD 525MB drive (being 525.7MB or something). Manufacturers are just trying to get something (our money) for nothing (missing drive capacity) and to make themselves look better and more productive. Consumers also have something to do with this. We are never happy with the latest and greatest. We will alw

Direct Link to claims

[micksam7]

File online [harddrive-settlement.com] [no cash, just software]

Mail-in [harddrive-settlement.com] [cash or software, cash claim only if bought before 2006 & you have proof-of-purchase. 5% of what you paid]

Re:Direct Link to claims

[houstonbofh]

cash or software, cash claim only if bought before 2006 & you have proof-of-purchase. 5% of what you paid

The mail in form also allows you to use your drive serial number as proof if you do not have proper documentation.

SI units

[Anonymous Coward]

1 GB (gigabyte) = 10^9 B
1 GiB (gibibyte) = 2^30 B

Re:

[bh_doc]

Exactly. The information technology sector is and has always been wrong to suggest that k is 2^10. It is not, and it will never be. k=10^3, M=10^6, G=10^9, etc.

Re:SI units

[DRobson]

Regardless of whether the IT sector is _technically_ in the wrong it's commonly accepted that in this area we work with powers of two. The fact that people have to explicitly explain this fact shows that everyone expects it to be that way. The HDD manufacturers damn well know this and fairly blantantly use measurements which would commonly be interpreted more favourably.

Re:SI units

[DiSKiLLeR]

Regardless of whether the IT sector is _technically_ in the wrong it's commonly accepted that in this area we work with powers of two. The fact that people have to explicitly explain this fact shows that everyone expects it to be that way. The HDD manufacturers damn well know this and fairly blantantly use measurements which would commonly be interpreted more favourably.

Exactly.

This says it perfectly.

RAM manufacturers do it correctly, and Application Vendors and Operating System Vendors have been doing it this way for DECADES. SI units be damned, this is the way it has always been and there is no reason for it to be changed.

Re:SI units

[dgatwood]

The problem is that a 2^k organization of bytes is fundamental to the way computers operate. It can't be changed to a power-of-ten unit just because it is "more convenient to work with" as the SI folks want. You can't realistically design a RAM chip with 1000 bytes of memory. You could do it, but you'd end up building one with 1024 bytes of memory and just burning out the last 24 cells. Ditto for all other forms of electronic storage, including the caches on hard drives. Only magnetic and optical storage have the luxury of defining units in non-power-of-2 ways, and yet they generally do not, choosing to standardize on 512-byte blocks primarily because if they didn't, the VM system's paging path would be heinously inefficient.

So we have a choice: we can either standardize on one unit---the base-2 definition of a gigabyte---or we can standardize on two units---one for RAM and one for hard drives---or we can foolishly standardize on the base-10 definition and have RAM chips described as 1.074 GB. I, for one, can't imagine that last choice being too popular, and the second choice (the status quo) is sufficiently confusing to an average layman that it really doesn't work, either. Thus, the only -reasonable- choice is to standardize on base-2 definitions of these units. There's a reason the standards were bent a bit fifty years ago. The SI units just don't work. They can't work. They will never work. And the sooner we stop trying to force a base-10 unit of measurement into a base-2 world---the sooner we can dispose of this fundamentally flawed view that everything must be in base 10---the sooner we can resume actually getting things done instead of quibbling over crap like this that was set in stone before most folks on Slashdot were even born.

Put another way, it's 9 years later, and the term kibibyte is still almost universally guaranteed to get you modded "troll" in any computing forum. Maybe it's type for the SI folks to realize that perhaps the reason their standard has been near-universally rejected in computing circles for almost a decayear is that it is fundamentally brain damaged from a practical use perspective.... It makes about as much sense if the SI had standardized base-10 units of time other than the second. Kiloweeks, anyone? Decidays? The SI folks wisely realized that moving time to a base 10 unit was not practical because the natural division of days into years could never be forced into base-10 units comfortably. Instead, they acknowledge the usefulness of these non-SI units as acceptable for use in spite of their non-base-10 nature. The same is true for computing, and they would be wise to acknowledge that the same fundamental problems hold true in this area.

Re:SI units

[amorsen]

It makes about as much sense if the SI had standardized base-10 units of time other than the second.

No, the comparison is if everyone decided to call weeks dekadays, but keep their length as 7 days. It's simply wrong. If you want to use the SI units, use the SI definition. Otherwise come up with your own terms.

Re:SI units

[Myopic]

The SI folks wisely realized that moving time to a base 10 unit was not practical because the natural division of days into years could never be forced into base-10 units comfortably. Instead, they acknowledge the usefulness of these non-SI units as acceptable for use in spite of their non-base-10 nature.

I totally agree! Now when can we please have reasonable measures of small quantities of volume, based on a unit approximately the size of two cupped hands? That's a human-understandable unit. Since it's based on cupped hands, we'll call it a "cup".

Re:SI units

[darthflo]

We had that kind of units. They went by the names of ell, foot, inch. After scientists realized that those units were pure idiocy for any kind of scientific work (and missed any kind of logic), they were replaced by the international system of units (abbr. SI). Units like the meters and grams have started replacing "old" units internationally starting in the 19th century and as for today, no civilized nation would ever have the idiotic idea to use something as arbitrary as a foot anymore, now would it?

Re:

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Only magnetic and optical storage have the luxury of defining units in non-power-of-2 ways, and yet they generally do not, choosing to standardize on 512-byte blocks primarily because if they didn't, the VM system's paging path would be heinously inefficient.

Using an OS's handling of RAM as a rationalization for 2^10 = K is a new one.

The fact is that NO modern hard disks have sector sizes of 512 bytes. You heard me, NONE. They commonly have payload sizes of 512 bytes, but the actual sector on a hard disk contains a lot more than just payload [freepatentsonline.com] - there are the ECC bits and the servo field which holds track, sector and disk head field grey code bits just to name the big ones. When added up, all the bits in a complete disk sector rarely equal a power of two, muc

Re:

[jimicus]

For an industry that regularly has to deal with and resolve ambiguities, it's surprising to me how inert it seems to have been on this one.

There wasn't an ambiguity before hard disk manufacturers decided to invent one.

Yes there was.

[camperdave]

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 machin

Re:SI units

[HappyEngineer]

Not that it's particularly relevant, but in the book "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, the characters used a timekeeping system where they talked about things like: "It'll take at least 10 Msec to get this done!" or "we've been travelling in hibernation for over 1Gsec! That's a long time!"

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:

[trentblase]

But the base 2 units have been used for decades. Calling that use anarchy is similar to saying that we shouldn't use "bug" to describe a software malfunction simply because it has another meaning. Context will always tell you the answer. In the computer context, kilo is 1024.

Re:SI units

[redhog]

No, not RAM. Anything you _address_. You don't address the 412th cycle in the CPU frequence, you don't address the 1201st byte in transmission speed, etc. You address RAM content, and disk content and ports and hosts on the internet. All such addresses are stored as binary numbers inside the computer, and can thus address two to the power of number of bits in the address numbers of positions (bytes, hosts, bits, whatever).

Re:

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

No, not RAM. Anything you _address_. You don't address the 412th cycle in the CPU frequence, you don't address the 1201st byte in transmission speed, etc. You address RAM content, and disk content and ports and hosts on the internet. All such addresses are stored as binary numbers inside the computer, and can thus address two to the power of number of bits in the address numbers of positions (bytes, hosts, bits, whatever).

Correction - you do not address disk content that way, you address filesystem content. Filesystems are defined by the host computer, disk sectors are not. Disk sectors exist independently from any host system and disks frequently contain an odd number of sectors, clearly not a power of two.

Furthermore, try finding a modern tape drive system with capacities measured in powers of two. You won't, they are all sized in base-10 units.

Re:SI units

[darthflo]

Everyone else except them uses KB/MB/TB/etc in a consistent - if not SI-compliant - fashion.

Bullshit. Remember 4.8 kbps modems which managed to transfer 4800 bps? What's the throughput of what's commonly referred to as Gigabit Ethernet, while we're on it? 1024 Mibps or more like 1'000'000'000 bps? What about an 1.5 Gbps SATA link? How many Pixels in a Megapixel? How many lomaniacs in a Megalomaniac?

Re:

[darthflo]

The problem with storage examples is the limitation they have - basically, there's only three kinds of storage: Hard drives, internal electronic (as in Flash, RAM etc) and removable devices. But since you pointed out that all storage is computed in base 2 by referring to the second kind, I found myself forced to check the capacities of some removable media: (Mkt. C stands for Marketed capacity, Real C for the actual Capacity)

Product| Mkt. C | Real C .| Result
Name
DVD . .| 4.7 GB | 4.3 GiB | bse 10
CD . .|

Re:SI units

[IWannaBeAnAC]

While I can see the technical merit in using the Ki/Mi/Gi prefix instead of K/M/G, I object to it for the simple reason that kibibyte, mibibyte and gibibyte are stupid sounding words and I refuse to use them for that reason alone.

It might be, for a newcomer, initially confusing that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes instead of 1000 bytes, but the original scheme is a consistent exception. The powers of 2 apply to bytes and only bytes, nothing else. 1Km = 1000 meters. 1KW = 1000 Watts. 1KB = 1024 bytes. 1 KN = 1000 Newtons. Not completely uniform, but there is no ambiguity.

On the other hand, if someone came up with a set of power of 2 prefixes that didn't suck, I'd happily switch.

Re:SI units

[amorsen]

The powers of 2 apply to bytes and only bytes, nothing else

They apply to bytes, when you happen to talk about RAM. Anything else, even flash, is in powers of 10. Sometimes, but rarely, they apply to bits as well -- 2Mbps E1 is 2048kbps. ADSL can go either way. In short, "consistent" is certainly not a good description of this mess.

Re:

[IWannaBeAnAC]

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

Re:

[Atario]

What's your problem with "meh be byte"?

Meh be byte, meh be bit, who knows? Meh be we should just forget it and go have a beer.

Re:

[jamesh]

I think that the Henry, and Coulomb are odd sounding units. It doesn't matter, they're the standard units.

On the other hand, the Fonzie is a very cool sounding unit.

Re:

[The Clockwork Troll]

In chemistry, it's very common to see heat capacity [wikipedia.org] expressed in terms of kilojoules per Kelvin (kJ / K).

I'd agree with your latter statement, but as long as I'm trolling, I'll point out that it was not technically the logical converse [wikipedia.org] of your former statement but rather a wholly different proposition (1: "I have never seen 'k' and 'K' together in a single unit." vs. 2: "I have never seen an ambiguous 'k' or 'K'").

In Soviet Russia, it fails you!

Seems Silly to me

[IcarusMoth]

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.

Re:

[gadzook33]

Yeah, other than the fact that computers suck at base-10 counting and are really really good at base-2 counting, you're absolutely right.

Re:Seems Silly to me

[hakr89]

You are buying the drive to store base 2 numbers, so why shouldn't the value be rated in terms of base 2?

Re:

[gadzook33]

Yeah, that was my point

Re:

[Prof.Phreak]

Indeed. Wait till they go after Gigabit Ethernet... uh, oh, it's only 1000000000 bits, not 2^30 bits!

Re:Seems Silly to me

[DiSKiLLeR]

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.

You're moronic.

Every operating system, whether it be Windows NT, XP, or Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris, states that 1Kb = 1024bytes, 1Mb = 1024Kb, and so on.

Every application, does too.

Why rewrite all software, and god forbid, patch all old software going back however many DECADES into the past to implement this change, when harddrive manufacturers could simply start labelling their drives correctly?

Besides, when you buy a gigabyte of ram, are you really getting 1 billion bytes? or 1073741824 bytes? You tell me :)

Last I checked, bios reported 1024Mb was a 1gb, and 4096mb was 4gb's of ram :)

I don't see why hdd manufactureres are the ONE single exception to this long standing rule, and SI units be damned.

Re:Seems Silly to me

[5pp000]

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:

[bestinshow]

The fact that the storage of data on a floppy disc (and hard drives) is segregated into blocks that are sized in powers of two (512 bytes for most floppies) suggests that the capacity of said drives should be expressed as a number that is a multiple of said block size.

E.g., Floppy Drive: 2 sides * 80 tracks * 9 sectors * 512 bytes = 720KB

Any other argument is totally pointless to be totally fair. If you want a base 10 capacity for binary data that is not stored in blocks of base 2 size you use bits, e.g., 2

Re:

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Note: The following post uses SI prefixes (e.g. GB=10^9 bytes, etc.) correctly. Binary prefixes are used when appropriate.

Every operating system, whether it be Windows NT, XP, or Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris, states that 1Kb = 1024bytes, 1Mb = 1024Kb, and so on.

WRONG. Use a modern Linux distro. You will find that many tools either use the binary prefixes or use SI-standard prefix usage.

Why rewrite all software, and god forbid, patch all old software going back however many DECADES into the past to impl

Re:

[darthflo]

Technically, you're right. Most "advanced" systems ("advanced" as in "catering a crowd that understands the difference between GB/GiB") are actually doing just that right now. Try `df --si`. Most commonly used other tools also include a similar if not the exact same switch.
On the other hand: If Joe sixpack buys a 200 Gigabyte hard drive, he'll expect Windows Explorer to show 200 Gigabytes of space. Vista will most probably eat about 50 of 'em, but that doesn't concern him, as long as there's 200 Gigabyte o

It's not a longstanding history

[Solandri]

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's not a longstanding history. It started in mid-1990s. In the early 1990s, if you bought a 300 MB drive, you got 300*1024^2 = 314,572,800 bytes.

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 [wikipedia.org]. 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).

Re:

[Anti_Climax]

Your description seems to be a hybrid of the tragedy of the commons and the Red Queen [wikipedia.org]

I say we call this hybrid theory the Tragedy of the Queen.

Re:Seems Silly to me

[otomo_1001]

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.

Re:Seems Silly to me

[nocomment]

Because computers are base2.

It might not sound like a big deal, but as HD's get bigger so does seagates 'edge' over the competition. They get to trim 73MB (or so) off every gig. This means that a 250GB drive from seagate is missing 18,435,456,000 bytes. A 500GB drive: 36,870,912,000. In the olden days, this wouldn't have mattered (much) because you weren't talking about a lot of space. People complained back then too. Now it's getting a little silly. If you need to build a 5TB array, there will be 368GB that's just missing (and that's not even counting the FS overhead).

Seagate isn't doing it to be a champion of change for a switch to base10 counting (if they were then it would make more sense), they are doing it to rip people off on a technicality.

Much like a RAM settlement offer in the mail

[phantomlord]

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).

Misleading by being correct?

[Empiric]

Giga-anything is one billion exactly of that thing.

Wikipedia notes its techie-colloquial usage, and states that it is incorrect according to the SI/metric standard.

"The prefixes k and greater are common in computing, where they are applied to information and storage units like the bit and the byte. Since 2^10 = 1024, and 10^3 = 1000, this led to the SI prefix letters being used to denote "binary" powers. Although these are incorrect usages according to the SI standards it seems common to apply base 10 p

Re:Misleading by being correct?

[fredklein]

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.

Re:

[Empiric]

Not sure who "we're" refers to there, but I did enough 6502 Assembly code in the 80's to have the first 16 powers-of-two burned into my brain to this day... and still I wouldn't try to claim my binary predilictions should hold sway over the international standard in court. ;)

Re:

[darthflo]

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. :)

Definitions

[mduke]

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.

Ahh, another valueless settlement.

[Harik]

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.

Re:

[Bemopolis]

It's not just a valueless settlement. It was a fucking retarded case to begin with. Wait, did I say fucking retarded? Just in case...fucking retarded. It's bad enough when law firms get windfalls from class actions suits with actual merit behind them. This? This is because Americans can't understand THE FUCKING METRIC SYSTEM. Or read the side of the FSMdamned box. Or, you know, take responsibility for not reading the side of the FSMdamned box.

Re:

[darthflo]

Wait, the Flying Spaghetti Monster damned the box?

Re:

[megaditto]

I known people that mailed in rebates for $0.50; having to pay $0.32 postage didn't matter either! For a company, those class-action lawsuits could still be pretty pricey due to all the penny-pinchers claming their dimes.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Meanwhile the cocksucking trial lawyers get a cool 1.8mn in cash.

Right, so everybody who feels this way needs to opt out of the settlement. There's a form letter [bfccomputing.com] on my blog you can copy and paste if you'd like.

The real meat of the blog post is bitching about how much it'll cost the class to opt out vs. what it costs the lawyers to create the class. This is an asymmetrical attack against society. It makes it really easy for the lawyers, but hard for everybody else. I wonder who wrote those laws!

Re:

[__aajfby9338]

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."

That was a fire at a factory which made the epoxy resin used to encapsulate ICs. This wasn't "special glue just for memory ICs"; it was the black plastic stuff molded around each IC on the SIMM (or any other kinds of ICs with plastic packages, for that matter). Without that plastic overmold to protect the bond wires and support the leadframe, the ICs can't be handled, shipped, soldered down, etc. That fire messed up the whole electronics industry for a while. I'm not saying that the memory suppliers didn'

Re:

[Atario]

*SIGH*

Ok, let's cover this one more time. Class action lawsuits are only sometimes intended to give a substantial settlement to all members of the class. The real point of them is not to get you rich, but to take down a wrongdoing company a few notches so that, with any luck, they'll know better next time — or at least think twice.

Either way.. we will pay

[Maxo-Texas]

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?

Yeah..

[mikkelm]

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.

If only....

[MrKevvy]

"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."

Another enhancement for Newegg!

[frankmu]

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!

Next stupid lawsuit...

[Forbman]

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...

Pointless

[ewhac]

Hard drive makers have, for some considerable time, have meant 10**9 (1,000,000,000) when referring to a gigabyte. They always so declare in their literature. I have some old IBM Deskstar drives with exactly this clarification.

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 [nist.gov] 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

What a crock

[SurturZ]

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.

Re:

[julesh]

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 me

Are you kidding me?

[joe_n_bloe]

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.

What?

[msimm]

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 [nist.gov] were pretty stable, not a lot of 'wiggle room' in the interpretation.

Concerning this Gibi nonsense

[PaladinAlpha]

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.

My Salary Calculation

[bangzilla]

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 :-)

Let's break down who's on what side here

[fo0bar]

Base 2:

• 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:

• hertz
• pixel
• gram
• meter (or metre, it's all good)
• watt
• volt
• newton
• ohm
• joule
• pascal
• lux

i hate these suits

[Loconut1389]

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.

Re:Cash or Backup?

[flyingsquid]

Yes, cash seems like a good option, but the problem is that Seagate defines the dollar as having 93 cents.

Re:

[Satertek]

It's only 5% though. Even if I didn't disagree with the ruling, I'd only get around $7 for the drive for which I paid $140.

This isn't gonna make a dent in Seagate, fortunately. You have to mail in your claim to get cash, and giving away the recovery software costs them essentially nothing.

Re:

[Lally Singh]

Seriously. The Wikipedia definition:

A gigabyte or Gbyte (derived from the SI prefix giga-) is a unit of information or computer storage meaning either 1000 bytes or 1024 bytes (1000 = one billion). The usage of the word "gigabyte" is ambiguous, depending on the context. 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 u

Re:

[npistentis]

I got an email from Seagate last week informing me that I was eligible to receive the refund, and happily went in and checked the "Decline Claim" box. I've explained the discrepancy to 100 different users over the years ("I ordered an 80GB drive and my computer says I only have xx GB of available space?!"), so it would've been hypocritical for me to accept money from a company that I like, offered because a few lawyers saw an opportunity to gouge the company over a technicality.

Re:WTF??

[I'm Don Giovanni]

" 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.

Re:

[emurphy42]

The problem is that you can't say "gibibyte" without sounding like a fucking tool. :)

Re:

[Rachel Lucid]

Would pronouncing it 'give-a-byte' help?

Re:

[emurphy42]

Probably not. Sounds too much like a plastic tray you'd see next to the cash register at Fry's - "give a byte, take a byte"...

Re:

[bmo]

"Would pronouncing it 'give-a-byte' help?"

SEDAGIVE!?!?

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/4159/sedagive.wav [geocities.com]

--
BMO

Re:Yet Again, the Courts Drop the Ball

[SaidinUnleashed]

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.

Re:

[houstonbofh]

For the record, the IEEE proposed this in 2005, and the case goes back to 2001. While this was a known issue, it was till misleading. They may have had to spend a lot to win this. And they may have lost...

Re:wow.... are you clueless!

[pipatron]

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?

Re:

[tilandal]

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 n

Re:

[Mozk]

I like how your username sort of matches with your ID. :P
A bit off-topic, but I did post with no karma bonus.

1GB is really 1,000,000,000 bytes

[OrangeTide]

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 do

Re:

[tilandal]

A bit is not an SI unit. A Byte is not an SI unit. A GB and a Gb are not accepted SI notation. Each has its own accepted context. A bit is a base 10 unit a byte is a base 2 unit. If you want to report your storage space in bytes it is accepted that you are reporting in base 2. If you would rather report in base 10 thats fine. You can advertise 8Gigabits, You can advertise 1 Billion Bytes, but you can not say that a GB is anything other then 2^30 bytes.