Computer Makers Sued Over Hard Drive Size

FPCat writes "Finally, some one is doing something about one of my pet peeves. It seems a group of people are suing Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, and others for misleading consumers about hard disk sizes. About time someone spoke up and said '1000 MB != 1 GB'" It's not much of a mystery to anyone who's up on industry practices, but it's similar to the way graphic displays are sized, cereal boxes are filled, and so on. Andy Rooney could have a field day with this one.

It's not the size of your disk

[Anonymous Coward]

It's how you use it. (Look, someone had to make the joke.)

Ewww!

[HeroicAutobot]

From the article (emphasis mine):

The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees.

I'm not sure what disgorgement means, but it sounds really gross.

RIAA chuckles in background

[Lord_Dweomer]

"That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs"

Oh the horror!!!!!!!!

In Other News:

[wo1verin3]

From the Article:
>>For example, when a consumer buys what he
>>thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the
>>plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140
>>gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10
>>gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra
>>2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.

In other news, the RIAA is going the way of minority report and has started a new pre-download offensive.

The RIAA is now hunting children down and suing parents over the potential songs that could be stored in the extra 10GB missing on 150GB hard disks.

Fine Print

[someguy456]

So now we're going to see fine print saying "Warning: actual byte conversions may vary" !

...monitors should be next!

[DevNull]

17" monitors, with 15.7" viewable?
Ya, I have an 11 inch... but you can only see 6.

Re:Ewww!

[civad]

disgorge
v. disgorged, disgorging, disgorges
v. tr.

1. To bring up and expel from the throat or stomach; vomit.
2. To discharge violently; spew.
3. To surrender (stolen goods or money, for example) unwillingly.

I would love it if the statement "The lawsuit asks......" uses disgorgement to describe the first meaning. I doubt Apple, etc. would do as meaning (2) suggests. Meaning (3) seems appropriate in this context.

Very simple..

[Sir Pallas]

Just read the box. All the HDs I've bought come in boxes that say "A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes." Given, they are older hard drives. If anyone is worried, they can just cat /dev/hda | wc to be sure.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[PurpleBob]

Helpful hint:
2^3 = 8
2^10 = 1024

Re:It's not the size of your disk

[KikassAssassin]

[dark helmet]
So, I see that your hard drive is as BIG AS MINE! Now... let's see how well you handle it.
[/dark helmet]

Re:Another reason why we need tort reform

[GordoSlasher]

So, a bunch of lawyers get obscenely rich and 2 years from now we all get a $5.00 coupon toward the purchase of a new disk.

I was expecting $5.12

That's what they want you to think

[Compact Dick]

But the truth is most women find bigger is better.

Yes I would know.

Re:About TIME!

[michaeltoe]

Explaining the binary system to a nation which can't even handle metric notation is unlikely to happen, even if the movement is backed by an angry mob...

Re:Nonsense

[Crispy Critters]

"Megalopolis, anyone? I'm pretty sure it doesn't refer to one million cities"

Right! Does "gigantic" refer to one billion ntics? Of course not!

I have to admit that grep '^giga' /usr/share/dict/words did not prove nearly as amusing as I had hoped.

I find it ironic...

[sheetsda]

that I can store roughly one first person shooter per gib of drive space.

Re:Yes it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

A gigabyte IS 1000 megabytes. A megabyte is, however, NOT 1024 kilobytes or 104576 bytes. That's MiB and GiB you're thinking of. Giga and Mega are SI prefexes. Not binary compatible.

I'm sorry, but you too are wrong. MiB is a movie, while GiB is a chunk of flesh in Quake, often formed when a body is impacted by a rocket. Neither of these has very much to do with hard drives, and your attempt to pass them off as some sort of computer-related measurement only proves that you are an evil marketing type trying to bilk clueless Americans out of their hard-earned dollars.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[Spazmania]

government mandate that tech companies have to use binary SI prefixes on labels.

Not likely. Most human beings count in 10s. Only technogeeks like us count in 2s. If the government standardized on anything, it'd be powers of 10.

Which means we'd all get to buy 1074 megabyte sticks of ram instead of 1 gigabyte sticks. Hey, how about that! An extra 74 megs for free. ;)

Re:RIAA chuckles in background

[nelsonal]

Great now the RIAA will sue the HD makers for making the disks too small and reducing their potential infringment collections by $300,000,000 per user. In other news SCO has announced that their patent portfolio includes all uses of the term giga- in referance to both base 10 systems and base 2 systems.

Oh my, the RIAA is gonna love that one.

[DaBj]

"That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs"

"Your honour, we couldn't download as many songs from kazaa as we hoped when we bought the drives."

ads

[QEDog]

This is insanely stupid, I can imagine in the near future the ads:

This computer comes with 100GB of HD*!

*HD size may vary. Some restrictions apply. Professional in a closed course. Caution, do not eat, migh be hot. Do not insert into ear canal. May cause seizure. May cause drowsyness...

Re:SI definitions

[Lurgen]

Judging by the typical end-users I deal with, a mere 24MiB/MB per gig isn't going to help - to them 1GB == FREE.

10GB == Their Email archive.
20GB == How much space they chew up when they .copy their entire hard disk up to the fileserver!
50GB == How much space they deserve.

Do any users actually pay attention to disk space, or do they just fill it up? You decide...

Lurgen.com [lurgen.com]
Lurgen's Blog [lurgen.com]

I tell women...

[siskbc]

Ya, I have an 11 inch... but you can only see 6.

...I measure starting from the base of my spine.

Andy Rooney on disk size

[cpeikert]

In a nasally, whiny voice:

"D'ja ever notice how disk manufacturers are using 10^9 as 'giga' instead of 2^30? I remember back when we useta get a true 1024 multiplier for every step up the metric prefix ladder. 'Course, then every megabyte would set you back $20, but it was a full 1048576 bytes you were getting, and that was something you could count on. Nowadays it seems as if every swindler out there is trying to lowball his numbers, just to save a little magnetic coating. And don'tcha hate it how you have to get up seven times every night to go to the bathroom, and your joints ache from leaning down to pick up the toilet seat? And how nobody likes to listen to an old codger whine about insignificant crap like how big a megabyte really is? I'm a sad, lonely old man."

Re:Whats next? 56k!=56k/s?

[Mad Marlin]

No, they did not. You young'uns probably don't remember it, but the first hard drive I ever owned was 10MB - 10240KB, on the dot (give or take a few bytes).

The first drive I bought that had this "SI compliance" misfeature was a 2 GB one, from Conner if I recall correctly. I think they are out of business now. The hard drive before that was 540 real MB's, and all of the ones before that were correct too, back to my first hard drive, which was 20 MB.

On a related note, one of my comp-sci professors always wrote mb instead of MB for megabytes. I was originally in engineering physics, where it is drilled into you to be anal-retentive with respects to units, and it pissed me off, because my first reaction was generally "what the hell is a millibit?"

Re:It's not the size of your disk

[Frymaster]

only to find out that its four or five megabytes too small?

read the originial post, hard drives are packed "like cereal".

setteling may occur.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[rifter]

Capital "K" means kelvin.

And capital "X" means Xobbes. :P

Re:This has always irritated me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, as a side note if anyone else is looking to sue someone, ice cream manufacturers recently reduced the amount of ice cream in their half-gallon containers rather than raise the cost. Despite the fact that thye no longer actually contain a half gallon, they are still clearly labelled "half gallon" on the containers (Though the ounces are properly listed, and anyone who knows how many ounces there are in a gallon knows they're being shortchanged).

Deceptive marketting practices make baby jesus cry. . .

When it comes to ice cream, I think that "Won't somebody please think of the children!!!" is more appropriate.

Perhaps the ice-cream makers are going to market the ice cream in those smaller containers as "lower in fat"?

Re:apple says

[jared_hanson]

I'm glad you pointed out the fine print issue. I seem to remember that complaining in the past led to almost every manufacturer and retailer putting this info in the fine print. I challenge people to find a major company who doesn't disclose this info.

Legally, I don't think they have much of a case. The fine print contains the discloser that they are suing about, so it is simply ignorance on the case of the consumer not to read it.

Take this example:

The U.S. court system has issued a ruling declaring that Microsoft should be split(1) into separate companies effective immediately(2).

(1) Split means remain one company while the ruling is appealled for the rest of eternity.
(2) Immediately means never, since said appeals will indefinately delay immediately.

The fine print is where all the substance is contained. Don't read it, and you don't know what you're getting.

Yay! Class action law suit!

[Greyfox]

If they win, all hard drive owners will get a certificate good for 2,000,000 bytes and the lawyers will get $5,783,774!

Re:Mine is only 3GB

[Neon Spiral Injector]

All of mine are wide, ultra wide in fact, and hot swappable to boot.

Re:This has always irritated me.

[freeze128]

Does this also have something to do with the recent reduction in size of software boxes, like PC games? It used to be that software was packaged in cardboard boxes that were 8" x 10". Heck, my Ultima: Ascention dragon edition is 12" x 15" (friggin HUGE!). Now the boxes are more like 5" x 7".

They're just trying to rip us off, I tell ya. We're not getting all the software we paid for!

Remedy

[Compact Dick]

After tjat I took a course in marketing. Now it's no longer small, but compact.

It's all about presentation!

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Gibibyte -- still getting used to that one ...

Not to mention the Giglibite, recently introduced Si unit of measurement for how badly a movie bites.

Re:Whats next? 56k!=56k/s?

[ppanon]

millibits?

Shades of an 18 inch high stonehenge.

Re:ads

[zurab]

This reminds me - just today I was looking at Rio portable players and when I checked out newer Nitrus model [digitalnetworksna.com] with "1.5GB" storage, it actually has an asterisk explaining that figure that says:

*1 GB equals 1,000,000,000 bytes

I was thinking how can they get away with that outright lie! Imagine this type of advertizing:

New Item! - Buy Ten* CD-R Discs and get 5 more FREE! Low price of $5.00 for 15 CD-R discs!!!
*Ten cd-r discs = 9 cd-r discs

And then I see this /. story and a lawsuit. I wonder if multi-media storage manufacturers are next.

Would those that modded that "Insightful" explain.

[Kjella]

I'll restate the parent post as a logic conclusion:

kilo != 10^3
kilo == 1000
------------
10^3 != 1000

Were you by any chance resposible for the old karma system, also known as "Slashdot math"?

Kjella

It's those damn americans..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever since they've changed the size of a gallon, they've gone ahead and tried to change all the units of measure to suit them..

1 gallon = 4.55L , unless your in america, in which case it's 3.78

Bloody yanks..

Maybe they should switch back.. think of the gas milage their SUV's would get then!

I can see it now...

[cwsulliv]

PC ad:
"Special: Upgrade to 1 Gigabyte RAM today and get an extra 7% more memory absolutely FREE!!!:

Re:Mine is only 3GB

[hdparm]

Too much 'hard'ware, my friend. Mine is just swap but with the --grow flag. That wy I handle most requirements on the fly.

Re:That's what they want you to think

[d3kk]

According to an email I just recieved, there is something I can do about it. In 8 weeks, no less.

Re:ads

[Anonymous Coward]

3Com is actually OneCom-pany tho.

Re:...monitors should be next!

[Krach42]

I saw an LCD monitor that was 15" but 16" viewable.

I guess they had some extra screen space that wasn't actually used for display...

no, I still don't know what they were thinking.

Re:It's not the size of your disk

[GreenKiwi]

[dark helmet]
So, I see that your hard disk is as BIG AS MINE! Now... let's see how well you handle it.
[/dark helmet]

With a little change it sounds even better...

Re:ads

[Epistax]

This does really matter from advertising, and one has to wonder how long they are allowed to lie. 1024 bytes aren't far from 1000, but how about a terabyte harddrive? With the current trend, you'd only get 91% of what you expect.

Re:ads

[mairas]

Oh, you mean like with, say, modems, where 14.4kbps = 14,400bps, 28.8kbps = 28,800 bps, and so on?

Or Ethernet, where 10Mbps = 10,000,000bps, and 100Mbps = 100,000,000bps?

But that is telecommunications, where the prefixes have been always powers of ten. If your data is lying still (or maybe rotating 60 rounds per second), it's powers of two, but if it's travelling through wires or thin air, it's powers of ten. Simple, ne?

Related pet peeve

[Kopretinka]

This product is just $49.99! *

*tax will be added on check out

Does kilometer contains 1024 meters?

[Cyberax]

"A novice programmer thinks kilobyte contains 1000 bytes, an experienced one thinks kilometer contains 1024 meters" :)

Re:ads

[mickwd]

"Had I purchased a hard drive to use as part of a support for holding up my car or as part of a wind chime or as a hat, I would expect the magnitude prefix to reflect the SI prefixes (1G = 10^9)."

Thank you, Sir, for writing the strangest sentence I have ever read.

You don't, perchance, happen to own a 10.24-gallon-hat, do you ?

Re:ads

[triiiple]

Yeah, and Britain is going metric, inch by inch.

Re:Mine is only 3GB

[driverEight]

All of mine are wide, ultra wide in fact, and hot swappable to boot.

I'll bet it's ultra fast too!

Re:It's not the size of your disk

[putch]

no, no, no.

it's all these new fangled cooling devices. they cause shrinkage.