Seagate's US customers get refund
When is a Gig not a Gig?
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Any punters who bought a Seagate hard drive in the US between 22 March 2001 and 26 September 2007 could be entitled to a five per cent discount on future Seagate products or free backup software.
The settlement is the result of a US class action suit. The case alleges that Seagate sold drives with seven per cent less storage than customers expected.
The case hinges on the precise definition of a gigabyte. The plaintiff alleges that Seagate sold drives using the digital definition of a gigabyte - so 1 GB = 1 billion bytes. This is misleading, the plaintiffs claim, because "computer operating systems typically report hard drive capacity using a binary definition of GB whereby 1 GB = 1, 073, 741, 824 bytes.
Although Seagate continues to deny all charges, it has agreed to settle the case. So anyone who bought a retail Seagate hard drive in the US can claim a five per cent discount on the price they paid. Seagate has also agreed to change the wording on its packaging to make its definition of a gigabyte clearer to consumers.
If you bought a hard drive before January 2006 you can either get the five per cent cash discount or free backup software. If your purchase was made after that, you can get a free copy of the backup software.
There are full details on the settlement website here.
COMMENTS
Re: Who Cares
"1Gb is 1024mb" - hmm, but 1024 millibits is awfully small!
WD Converted 200MB ot 212MB
I remember when WD changed their units. I bought 2 WD Caviar 21200 (I might have the model number wrong) drives many years ago about a week apart. Both had identical drive geometry. The first was advertised as a 200MB drive. The second as 212MB. Same drive. That was the week they changed.
And their excuse? Because DOS CHKDSK reports capacity in millions of bytes! Which it doesn't. It reports it in bytes, with commas as thousand separators.
People can argue about MB & MiB as much as they like but the MB started out meaning 1024*1024 and got changed.
And while you know what you're getting, I have NO IDEA how much data I can store on a 4GB SD card. It may be 4*1024*1024*1024 and it should be. No other number makes sense. I know how much RAM there is in a 1GB SDRAM stick. It's 1024*1024*1024. And for good reason. Computers work in powers of two and programmers need to as well.
But marketing will always win out the day and WD probably did better advertising that drive as a 212MB than they did as a 200MB even though it was IDENTICAL hardware.
Who cares
So Seagate get their wrist slapped for something any computer savvy person knew anyway. 1Gb is 1024mb, always has been and always will be. If not then why arent memory chips and various other components measured as 1000 ? Or does this mean my PC has been 'upgraded' and now has 2.1Gb of memory ? In other words, why should HD manufacturers be allowed to count differently from all the other component makers !
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