It looks as though Seagate has dug themselves a small hole, and is having a hard time getting out of it. On the packages of their hard drives they used to state the storage space in terms of gigabytes, which isn’t anything out of the ordinary. The problem lies within how they specify what a gigabyte actually is. They say that 1GB is equal to 1 billion bytes, but any computer savvy person knows that isn’t the case. In fact, 1GB is equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes which turns out to be a difference of over 70MB.
Seagate didn’t just make that error in the specification either. The hard drives themselves were shortchanged 70MB for every 1GB of space they were said to have, that’s a difference of about 7%! That may not seem significant, but purchasing an 80GB hard drive would mean that you would really get less than 75GB of space.
As you can imagine a lawsuit has resulted from this, and if it gets approved on February 7, 2008 a lot of people will be getting small refunds. If you bought one of the millions of hard drives sold between March 22, 2001, and January 1, 2006 you can go ahead and submit a short claim form. If it ends up getting approved you’ll receive 5% cash back on the purchase price of the drive.
Note: This is for U.S. customers only who purchased the hard drive individually. If the hard drive came with a computer you are not eligible for the refund.
Source: Computer World
this is so old news, I got an eMail from Seagate several weeks ago, also only certain purchases are eligible for refund everyone else is eligible for a software package.
Don’t most manufacturers do this?
ALL do this. The problem is that the veredict gives buyers the right to demand a little refund, but only from Seagate, and the problem of 1000 vs. 1024 bit is still there. HDD makers are not forced to communicate the true size of their drives
My Western Digital 80GB drive that I bought a few years ago has 74GB of usable space on it. I assumed that most people recognised that they would loose some space on the quoted specs for every GB they paid for. Can we sue every single hard drive manufacturer then? It seems stupid to me, I don’t want to buy a drive listed in Bytes so the company doesn’t get sued.
Can anyone say greedy?
It is a bit greedy, but I do think that hard drive manufacturers should correctly specify the storage capacity.