So Seagate is in reality giving us more than they claim they give us, so we want a refund until we get less for the same price.

I propose a new storage standard. The MaybeByte. :D

I propose people start taking responsibility for their own ignorance...

Agreed, but then, I remember how many years it took me to even want to try to understand what computers were really about or how they worked, simply because of all the dumb esoteric and purposefully obscure language that was used by those people that were playing with computers like the "Altair" and the "IMSAI". That kind of attitude still exists to this day. If you don't believe me just go ask a few technical questions to those people in computer stores. They will lose you in seconds unless you also have a computer science degree!

By the way, that's what is slowing down the use of Linux. People are used to the "lingo" used in Windows and when they try using Linux they are stuck facing to learn an entirely new "lingo"

New Logo: "New HDD, with EXACTLY 31,140,876,288 bytes"

oh... come on...

that's just stupid...

every person decently knowledgeable in computers knows that the GB count does not really match the size advertised...

sue those two idiots for being 'picky' and too ignorant to own a computer...or a Hard Drive for that matter...

(most users dont even know the difference between Mbps and MBps ¬¬, the same thing...)

I don't understand how a company can be liable for the lack of understanding on the part of the consumer.

Isn't it the consumers "job" to be responsible for their purchases?

The only way this would have been a deceitful practice by Seagate would have been if they had called it a 200GiB drive that only had 200GB on it.

Yes, they should be selling and marketing them in GiB. That's the way data is stored. But regardless, they are not lying to anyone. 200GB (according to standards...) is 200,000,000,000 bytes, and most drives sold as 200GB actually have slightly more than that.

I can't believe they didn't fight this. Just because the majority of clueless United States drones don't know the difference between a GB and a GiB shouldn't result in them losing money.

Try educating people instead of suing the wrong parties. Try taking responsibility for your own lack of klnowledge instead of blaming some company like a 6 year-old.

Damn money grubbing bas****s.

Disbelief? Seagate apparently knew what it was and was not doing.

Think and compare it to a hidden seven percent tax about which anyone but a CPA would be clueless. Do you know every intricacy of the tax code? Or, even all of its most basic terms and definitions?

Try living in the *real* world where most "clueless drones" still don't know a mouse from mousse. Tool, you just gotta be smarter than that remark makes you appear. (Having a bad Sunday?)

But worry not about your friends at Seagate. How many people actually have their original proof of purchase, especially from 6 years ago? Again, it's that real world view vs. definitively Utopian misconceptions.

Hidden? Only to the clueless ones.

A gibibyte (a contraction of giga binary byte) is a unit of information or computer storage, abbreviated GiB[1].

1 gibibyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1,024 mebibytes

Whereas,

1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1,000 megabytes.

Welcome to the wonderful world of binary; The world in which computers operate. Data is stored in binary format, it is read in binary format. Why is it you people insist on describing it in metric terms? It makes absolutely no sense.

This isn't complicated, nor intricate. This is basic. The fact that it's not widely taught is not Seagate's fault. perhaps the idiots suing should use their new-found money to educate instead of abusing the legal system.

Do you know every intricacy of the tax code? Or, even all of its most basic terms and definitions?

No. But not knowing doesn't allow me to sue the IRS when I screw up my tax return, now does it? Ignorance is no excuse, and it certainly shouldn't equate to a paycheck for these morons.

So what is the difference between those 2 and a gibibit and a gigabit?

Gibibit = binary
Gigabit = metric

gebi = 1024
giga = 1000

...as explained by the poster above. Just swap bytes with bits. :)

Hit Wikipedia or http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html if your interested in the down and dirty. (the second one gets even more technical)

"Welcome to the wonderful world of binary; The world in which computers operate. Data is stored in binary format, it is read in binary format. Why is it you people insist on describing it in metric terms? It makes absolutely no sense.

This isn't complicated, nor intricate. This is basic. The fact that it's not widely taught is not Seagate's fault. perhaps the idiots suing should use their new-found money to educate instead of abusing the legal system."

Is that the argument you would make to the jury (composed of clueless citizens)? Good thing you ain't a lawyer.

Apparently, you don't understand that there's no way to explain to a juror why their new 500GB drive only holds 465GB of data *and* have them feel good about it *and* have them believe it was their own fault for reading the characters 5-0-0-G-B on the box and not knowing the difference between a gigabyte and a gibibyte.

Why didn't they fight it? What a laugh.

"no way to explain to a juror why their new 500GB drive only holds 465GB of data"

Did you read any of what was posted? Have you read ANY of the posts here? "Edumacate" yourself.

The problem is that they sued Seagate for reporting the values CORRECTLY. 500GB = 500,000,000,000 bytes. They bought a 500 GB drive ... and got one! What they didn't do was buy a 500GB drive and get a 500GiB drive.

The fact that they do not know the difference between GB and GiB is not Seagate's responsibility. There should never be a jury on this because it is stupid and any judge worth the money we pay them would have thrown it out the second it hit the system.

"it was their own fault for reading the characters 5-0-0-G-B on the box and not knowing the difference between a gigabyte and a gibibyte."

Are you actually implying that it is any companies job to educate consumers?

..and here I was thinking that's what we had schools for.

The question was why didn't they fight it. The answer is the fact that juries are made up of the clueless.

And if you had read the entire sentence instead of what you quoted, you would understand that, to WIN THE CASE, you not only have to teach them the difference between giga and gibi, but you also have to convince them that they should've known it already. That's if you don't want them to be sympathetic to the plaintiffs, which they will be, because the only people who've ever heard of a gibibyte read slashdot on a regular basis.

And that's not who would be on the jury.

Meh...

I do not believe you'd have to convince the jury that they should have known, they aren't the ones suing.

You'd merely have to prove that two standards exist, that one was chosen by Seagate, and that the folks suing have conveniently and incorrectly swapped the definition of those standards.

Still, that's assuming it ever hit a trial. As stated above, any decent judge should have, laughing, thrown this out with prejudice.

The problem stemmed from ignorance... I mean they did put on the box 250Gb drives!!! but when they installed them they normally saw much less then they expected. and as drive sizes grew so did the gap. This was purely marketing... they knew that the public in general would not know the difference, BUT if they changed to go with a better representation of capacity (real time capacity) That it would only serve to further confuse the public.

Techs knew about this from like forever.. It was never a big deal. Except when you told a client that you were installing a 300GB drive and they didn't see 300GB capacity in their explorer after wards... It made us look pretty bad at times true, but it was something we expected when dealing with the public.

I honestly never expected a lawsuit over such as this. But its interesting to see that they managed to evoke some change in the marketing now... which is good all around... At least for the public point of view.

I have been reading about the online backup industry for a while now. Online backup is maturing and slowly getting the attention of the general consumer. One website worth mentioning is the backup review site:

http://www.BackupReview.info

This very informative site, not only posts up to date news and articles from the industry, but also lists about 400 online backup companies and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis and features a CEO Spotlight page, where senior management people from the industry are interviewed.

Get lost, spammer.

I agree with Lakaiguy85. If people are not willing to learn about the computers they are buying and what is in them, then they should move on. Computers are not free and neither is learning about them. It took me years along with two years in college to learn computer repair and installations and if I had to pay for it, I sure am not giving it away.

The problem for the most part is, people need to learn to read, yes thats right, learn to read. These kinds of lawsuits are foolish and senseless all because they were too lazy to read about what they were getting.

But it is alright, for all the lazy people who do not understand and think someone else will do it for them, I make my money on it :) Every service call is $45.00 and repairs or installations is extra, yeaaaa, so keep on not reading or learning...

People who use computers are a far cry from those who know computers. Identical to those who drive a car don't know jack about how to repair it if it breaks.

Knowing about this sort of thing should not be an average consumers problem. It should be this company's problem for not making something so clearly odd easier to understand. I mean so now someone has to know math, understand what bits/bytes are and how the industry differs in comparing them? Come on now.

No excuse for saying your drive is a certain size, especially when its bigger before its actually used. Deception is the only answer to that. I mean you don't see them advertising its 450 gb when its actually 500 do you ? Gee why would that be?

I mean a car that rates at 400 horsepower is actually only 360 when its hooked up to the transmission would be the same thing, technically correct but not true in the end.

Well I do have a motorbike does says caliber 115 (Indian) where the actual engine size is 111.6 cc. There are differences is the automobile industry. From my point of view it would be totally misleading as the capacity grows further. I mean the difference is KB and kB is merely 0.24% while in GB 7% difference becomes even further when it comes to TB (Tera Bye). Automobile industry will not suffer this and infact it would misleading and try to justify the marketing tactic used by the Hard Driver manufactures. I would suggest them to use 1024 as K as it is how allocated in the Hard Drive and this is how the windows calculates the space on the hard drive will give the correct picture of the drive space. It would be wise to follow how Microsoft calculates the free space as many of us are using Microsoft os anyway.

I think that is the point here. Agree on a standard. If the majority of people use windows, especially those who buy drives from BB or CC then why would they purposely use something that would make their drives look bigger? Yeah I have a 500 GB drive oh wait, its only 460 after formatting.

Maxtor was only recently acquired by seagate this lawsuit is for drives made in the 01-05 era, so no, no refunds on Maxtor Drives! They won't have the issue again no drive company will because if you walk down a hard drive isle and look on every box it says in fine print 1,000,000,000 kb = 1gb.

I think people should learn about computers, before they buy, i'm a salesman and it's horrible it's to the point where i get people who come in and say "teach me how to use a computer" and threaten to leave because i won't, but they don't see why i won't show them, because you know why i don't show them? Cuz when i was 12 i was taking old computers apart and putting them back together, it has taken me years to learn what i know about computers and they want me to basicly sum it up in about 30 mins, hell no never going to happen and the company i work for has it's own computer repair shop in the store and we offer 1 on 1 trainings on computers but as soon as anyone finds out it's going to cost them money to learn they duck like cowards and leave! Theres not enough people who see advantages with services our "extended Warrenty" gets shot down all day long because of some 20/20 bulls*** on them, do people not realize when they take a computer home that the machine is very fragile? No, they toss it around after a month of having it and they break it. What now sucker drop another 1000 bucks on a new one??? Too bad you didn't get our 300 dollar Service Plan cuz we would have pulled a new one in the box and handed it over, because we have accidental Damage coverage not to mention we cover the battery and the power adapter, ever price those? Not to mention a place the customer can bring the laptop to be looked at when it's having issues and a quick resolution to the problem, if you don't get the service plan good luck sending it out where is will probably get more damaged on the way to or from shipping, it makes me laugh; next time you turn one down just think about the investment your making you get insurance on your car, your home, why not on your computer? For a lot of people computers are their lives, how do i feel when i have to tell them they have to wait 2 months to get it back because they didn't get our plan???? Not to effin bad cuz i tell everyone about them and i get shot down, i laugh because people are ignorant! Eh sorry about the rant!

and you're trying to sell your computer services to the 90% of the people the read this stuff who are computer techs? and by the way, most of the time 'extended warranties' are worthless. oh sure you'll sale someone a warranty till your blue in the face 'till it's time to collect on it. *cough*bestbuy*cough*

Oh, you realized that he was talking about Best Buy in the first place? ;) Computers aren't *that* fragile unless one is careless.

i am sure you sell a lot of service agreements by insulting the customers eh? You give best buy or circuit city the very customer service rep it deserves.

You need to grow up, 90 percent of the people in the world don't know jack about computers and could care less. They use them for work, check their email, look at porn and well thats about all they care about.

Trying to sell someone who most likely builds computers or has something to do with the industry, like people who read betanews.com most likely are going to laugh at your post.

I personally found it disgusting people like you sell computers to people who are new to them. They deserve to have someone to give them a few points and ideas of what a computer is even used for. I mean I can't imagine you have anything better to do. Go schmooze with your other blue shirt buddies I guess or hit on the hot chick that works in cell phones.

I would never buy an extended warranty. The big box stores already overprice their products to begin with. For example BB sells a specific hard drive for $125.99, small privately owned computer shop 2 blocks away exact same drive $94.99. The big box store should include an extended warranty for the $31.00 difference.

Something I like to do with the big box stores on occasion is take advantage of their price guarantee. I find something they are extremely overpriced on, show them the price on the website for the shop around the corner and make them beat it by 10% of the difference that they promise.

This is just another frivolous lawsuit. Manufacturers didn't choose to use the decimal definition of a gigabyte solely to piss customers off.

No, they did it because their marketing department were a bunch of idiots who never listened to the engineers.

They chose to use the metric definition. They should have used the binary definition.

Regardless, the fact that many folks (apparently by great majority in the US) don't know the difference is Seagate's fault how?

Bet they're sorry that legislation requiring the value of Pi to be 3.0 didn't pass!

The GigaByte vs Gibibyte issue will rage for some time. It's a bigger issue as drives get larger.

As a general rule most people assume a GibaByte is 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Whether the definition is wrong or not, it's common thinking.

Ideally drive makers could aviod any confusion by listing both GiB and GB values.

I do find it misleaading.. as most people don't realize that drives are stating GB and not GiB.

It's been made worse due to the way most operating systems refer to calculated results.

Interestingly... how do floppy disks (3.5 and 5.25" disks or even CD/DVDs report?). I can't recall off the top of my head.

A gigabyte(GB) is 1000 megabytes(MB) while a Gibibyte(GiB) is 1024 mebibytes(MiB).

http://www.iec.ch/zone/si/si_bytes.htm

"A gigabyte(GB) is 1000 megabytes(MB) while a Gibibyte(GiB) is 1024 mebibytes(MiB)."

What the heck's a Gibibyte and mebibyte?

The man is right, it's a International Electrotechnical Commission stnadard in naming. It's out there for a while, "kilo" will always mean 1000, not 1024.

"What the heck's a Gibibyte and mebibyte?"

HipHop Geek?

Baby talk.

The terminology used when people talk specifics of measurement regarding an amount of data, so there is no confusion.

Also a standard unit of measurement around the world. The fact that it's not taught widely in the US is no surprise, nor is the fact that this will likely be met with some kind of response analgous to, "Of course we don't use it, it's stupid", which follows quite nicely the posts below mine.

When will people learn that something isn't stupid or useless just because they've never heard of it?

I simply wonder why the people targeted Seagate, as all others do the same.

As for why there is a problem, it is very annoying to look at a BIOS screen and see that difference the moment the computer boots.

Numbers are a bit off - for example:
500 GB = 500000000000000 (dec)
= 549755813888000 (bin)
= 90.94947017729282379150390625% (dec/bin*100)

That's nearly a 9.05% difference between the two.

Then of course you have to account for formatting, which eats further but that is at least an expected difference since it is actually used space, where as that 9.05% difference is non-existent space that you can't use - even for formatting space.

Thus, why when I look at hard drives I always take what they say and recalculate the actual binary space size for comparisons and to make sure I get the right amount of space I am looking for. ;-)

What the article fails to mention is whether Mr. Lazar or Ms. Cho are lawyers (any bets?).

I think since hard drives became available they have always stated how their storage was calculated. I remember even in the 5mb - 10mb days they always said whether it was a "real" megabyte or a "verbal?" megabyte.

How about we sue Apple & Microsoft now because when they format my nice big drive, after the format I still have less than what I would have had regardless of the way it's calculated.

"How about we sue Apple & Microsoft now because when they format my nice big drive, after the format I still have less than what I would have had regardless of the way it's calculated."

No, you have exactly the same amount. There is less space available to the operating system, but the storage capacity of the drive remains the same.

"[...]after the format I still have less than what I would have had regardless of the way it's calculated. "
That is hilarious ^_^

He's being fecitious here. The point is this lawsuit means so little in the big scheme of things; and about the settlement? Big wow.

Around the 500 megabyte time, Quantum was one of the last manugafacturers to change to decimal counting system for how much they hold. Not 10mb days as you might "remember". They were still using the ^2(binary) counting method.

Not really... If you look at how FAT32 or even NTFS uses block sizes, you can see that even a 1K file can take up 4K, 16K or even more if the block size is bigger. Fill up your drive with 1000's of 1K files, and you could potentially run out of space on a 100GB drive with less than 10GB of actual data on the drive. Unless all your files happen to be even block size increments, you'll never 'fill' a hard drive to capacity.

You won't see that explained on the outside of any box...

Who is the dumba*ss that doesn't realize that their new 200GB drive is only going to be 187GB formatted? lol... People want to use computers, but they dont want to understand them. Sad.

The lawsuit isn't over formatted size at all, its over the definition of a gigabyte. What they called a 500GB drive is what the rest of the IT community would call a 465GB drive (500,000,000,000 / 1024^3) that would be formatted down to 420GB or so.

That's like saying that everyone who drives a car has to know about internal combustion. If the car maker said you had a 20 gallon tank but you could only get 18 gallons in there, wouldn't you be upset?

Computers are designed to be used by everyone, so the terminology should be consistent across all fields. And this is coming from a computer consultant...I get paid to explain these types of things to people! :)

I hate analogies that compare computers to cars (or washers). You can't do much to modify the workings of a car, but you sure can with computers. I can run all kinds of software on my computer. However, I do very little under the hood of my car and there's no software to modify or replace.

Huh? Sure there is:

"Software":
http://www.superchips.com/
http://www.diablosport.c...;func=display&pid=3

"Hardware":
http://www.summitracing.com/
http://www.fordracingparts.com/sema/2007.html

Nothing for any of my vehicles, and not much for most of the vehicles on the road. And nowhere near the functionality and flexibility you get from computer software. Other than that, not bad.

Ok, so you bought and drive a "Packard Bell". Knowing your options now, perhaps your next computer may be something "upgradable". Concerning the software, you can pretty much tweak any parameter in the vehicle (good or bad), and it IS computer software, so I don't see how it's not as functional or as flexible.

Going outside my small search google has 92M pages of "performance parts" and 2.6M for "performance tuner" so there may be something for your car, but you may have to search for it.

Oh God! I don't even want to think about driving the car equivalent of a Packard Bell! :-O

Better than a "Packard He||" or a Compaq (what should be done to them). ;) Both are 99' (one came with the wife [nice package] and the other with the in-laws) and run pretty good. Computer software for automobiles have to be quite robust or people's lives could be endangered. I'll hate to be going 75 down the freeway and get a "Fatal error" that could become quite literal. There is way more software out there for computers than there ever will be for automobiles, as software for automobiles will be focused on how the automobile itself is affected, not just what it enables the driver to do.

Your Google query would naturally include a lot of results that have nothing to do with automobiles. I found webpages having to do with Java, WMCE, networks, and Windows XP. And there's going to be spam pages.

I am willing to bet at least 3 out of 4 people who use computers now days, which is almost everyone who works in some way or another doesn't have the first clue how a computer works or anything else. So if they run out of hard drive space, go to a store and buy a new one and it says 200gb and they put it in their computer and its only 187 or whatever you are going to think something is wrong, like you got the wrong drive or was mislead.

We buy cars, houses and other electronics and most people don't have a clue about those either. So should we know everything about everything now that we buy by your definition of people being dumb?

Computers are confusing enough the way it is for a lot of people. The last thing we need is to have something silly like the people who make hard drive deceiving people into believing their hard drives contain more space then they do. Yes 500 gb formatted is only what 460? That is not fair or right in my opinion and they deserve to pay out a little bit.

I mean say 500Gb on the box but then say (only 460gb with ntfs this amount with fat 32 etc.) I mean its only fair. That way you know if you have to have 500 GB you can buy the 600 or 750 drive and aren't scratching your head with 460.

Does this include Maxtor drives, which are made by Seagate too?

I have an External 500GB Maxtor OneTouch III, is there any chance of a refund?

Oh, and I live in the UK.

*Edit* Program86: I'm pretty sure they all know, but where there's a chance of free money there's always going to be a lawsuit.

"I'm pretty sure they all know, but where there's a chance of free money there's always going to be a lawsuit."

Very true, people are always trying to get extra $$$.

Drive manufacturers really should list the measurement that is commonly used, which is the binary definition. Not quite as bad as selling metric measurements when one is expecting US measurements, but still...

What I also find annoying is having to leave 20% of the drive free in order to avoid issues. On a 1TG drive, that's 200GB!

"20% of the drive free in order to avoid issues."

Never heard of this number.. but delete one zero perhaps try to have 20-40 Gb free.

Try a defragging program. They'll squawk (or refuse to run) if you have less then 15% free and they prefer you have at least 20% free.

Two options:
1. Don't defrag - and once every 3-6 months copy the entire HD to a temp location, format, then copy it back to the original drive - will magically-defrag it faster than any defragger and healthiest on disk!
2. Run Diskeeper and let it constantly defrag in the background. Needs minimal space to operate. Keep a static pagefile so it doesn't get defragged, ever.

I do find how drive manufactures advertise a bit misleading. It isn't so much of an issue until you get up to the larger drives, like the 750gb drive. Formatted in the OS it shows up as 698gb, that is just over 50GB less than what is advertised. Granted that is still a lot of space, imagine how much the gap will widen with multi terabyte drives! I think manufactures should change their calculations, both Microsoft and Apple use the binary definition, at least in their OS, not sure about their MP3 players.

my 30GB ipod shows up as about 27GB total, formatted.

I have a 160 Seagate drive that formats to: 149.05

Decimal to Binary Conversion

10 GB 9.31 GB
20 GB 18.63 GB
30 GB 27.94 GB
36 GB 33.53 GB
40 GB 37.25 GB
60 GB 55.88 GB
74 GB 68.91 GB
80 GB 74.51 GB
100 GB 93.13 GB
120 GB 111.76 GB
150 GB 139.69 GB
160 GB 149.01 GB
180 GB 167.64 GB
200 GB 186.26 GB
250 GB 232.83 GB
300 GB 279.40 GB
320 GB 298.02 GB
400 GB 372.52 GB
500 GB 465.65 GB
750 GB 698.47 GB
1 TB 931.30 GB
1.5 TB 1396.95 GB
2 TB 1862.6 GB