Computer Makers Sued Over Hard Drive Size 1090
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.
Step in the right direction (Score:2, Insightful)
They are getting MORE than they think!
This is really a shame. (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope this gets dismissed quickly.
Another reason why we need tort reform (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:SI definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
1. For hard drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB
2. For RAM, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
3. For mp3 players, it depends
4. For CD-R, DVD-R/w, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
5. For USB flash drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB.
Unless you are very used to dealing with these markets, they can be hellishly difficult to understand.
This is lawsuit material? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're really in a tizzy about this, just invent the distinction "binary GB|MB|KB" and "decimal GB|MB|KB" and stick with that.
What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
If PDA manufacturers can get sued for it, why not their desktop counterparts?
Re:i don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unnecessary confusion (Score:2, Insightful)
The last time I checked, two to the third power (2^3) is eight.
To get 1024, you would bit shift the binary value 1 up 10 places. (110)
Re:Unnecessary confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
This is of course why 19 inch monitors are now labeld with thier viewable size in addition to the tube size. Because of a lawsuit just like this...
This has always irritated me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. . .
Lawsuits to protect the stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Good grief, Charlie Brown... (Score:5, Insightful)
* If you actually know what 2^10, 2^20, etc is, you already know enough to see if the manufacturer means 1000 or 1024.
* If you don't, you're not going to notice a few percent difference.
* The average moron falls under number 2.
I mean, this is practically the *meaning* of a trivial lawsuit. No one will get anything from this except a bunch of scummy lawyers (Not that all lawyers are scum; it's just that the scum get more attention)
Personally, I think that when the law code is so convoluted, long, cross-linked, and full of antique, useless waste that you can make millions of dollars interperting it for others, it's time to do a serious code audit.
Why the HW manufacturers? (Score:2, Insightful)
They could say it has an 18.6GB HDD. But if you open up the case, you'd see the HDD saying otherwise. Then someone would sue over that. So where does it end? Damned if you do, damned if you don't? Why not sue the HDD manufacturers and stop it where it starts?
They're barking up the wrong tree, IMHO.
Re:Whats next? 56k!=56k/s? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another poster has pointed out that some components are measured in SI-unit GigaBytes (=10^9 bytes), such as RAM or CD-Rs, while others are measured in Binary-unit Gigabytes (=2^30 bytes = 1 GiB), such as HDs.
Now, the plain hard drive manufacturers haven't been sued because they are consistently using only SI units. But the desktop PC sellers are advertising using MBs and GBs everywhere, (deliberately? unknowingly?) not paying attention to the differences, thereby misleading the consumer.
They'll say "look, it's got 512MB of RAM and 80 GB hard drive space," but that is actually 536,870,912 bytes vs. 80,000,000,000 bytes (which is closer to 74.5 GB). And that is some good ground to sue on.
Download a patch to increase the size of your .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why can't the OS report all sizes in MB, GB, etc. instead of MiB, GiB, etc.? Are the coders so lazy that they insist on using a bit shift operator to divide by 1024, rather than actual division by 1000? Are we so stuck with the legacy of powers of two that we can't change things now?
Seems like a simple patch to the OS would have everything reporting based on powers of 1000. As a side benefit, I'd get my "missing" 14 GB of space back on that new firewire drive.
Re:apple says (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, with their definition, they're only claiming to have less capacity than they actually do have, so there's nothing to complain about, really.
Re:Unnecessary confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This has always irritated me. (Score:3, Insightful)
No your 120 Giga (as in billion) byte hard drive is 120 billion bytes. You're thinking that Giga is a base 2 unit, when it's a base 10 unit.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This has always irritated me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong Defendants (Score:2, Insightful)
OK. I agree that the same standards should be used, but why are they suing Apple, Dell, HP, etc.? I would expect them to sue Maxtor, Quantum, Western Digital, Seagate, etc.
Sure it's possible that computer manufacturers are in collusion with hard drive manufacturers to dupe the public on size; but its just as likely that Apple, Dell, et. al. enter contract to purchase a certain number of hard drives at the manufacturer specified size; and that's the size reported on general advertisement.
That said, almost every computer I've purchased from Apple has listed the amount of available space for general use, written in its detailed specification somewhere. I admit to never looking for it at Dell, and never purchasing from the other vendors.
It seems to me, if they were going to sue over misleading claims, the the MHz, GHz myth would be more apt. Since 1GHz != !Ghz depending on which chip and a host of other issues. Least the drive information is consistently wrong.
Argh! (Score:3, Insightful)
YES IT DOES! It's 1024 MiB that equals 1 GiB. 1000 MB is a perfect way to describe 1 GB.
Re:Whats next? 56k!=56k/s? (Score:2, Insightful)
Absolutely right!
What most of the posters here don't seem to get is this has been a conscious decision on the part of the manufacturers. It wasn't always this way.
And as for 56k modems, they are not 56k bits, never have been 56k bits and never will be 56k bits per second. They are restricted by law to something less than that to "protect" the phone network.
I'd like to see someone take them on too.
Convenient Rounding... (Score:2, Insightful)
at one point, HDs really were 120,200,500 MB, etc... for MB=1024*1024 bytes.
as drives got bigger and bigger, they wanted tp keep the convention of even sizes... 10,20,40,80,100 GB.... but to do that, they needed to get creative.
Fact is, the actual capacity of a disk is determined by several factors: how many platters, how many tracks, how many sectors per track, how those sectors translate into addressable blocks, what small fraction of the disk may or may not be usable on each unit due to acceptable defects, etc...
In reality, hard drive sizes vary slightly from model to model and unit to unit, all supposedly of the same capacity. The actual capacity probably isn't a number anywhere NEAR an integral X*2^n or X*10^n.
Even with flash disks, calculating capacity from the number of blocks may not be a convenient number.
So, we take the actual or estimated capacity and round to the closest X*10^n that looks good. Exact size down to the byte doesn't matter, drives aren't byte-level addressable.
Memory is still done with X*2^n cause it's byte addressable: The exact amount DOES matter, MUST always be that much on every unit, and has to be added or removed in some 2^n increment.
Now, I do believe HD manufacturers changed from 2^n to 10^n and rounded up to get whole numbers. Remember 1.2, 2.1, 3.2, 4.3 GB drives? That's what you get when you force youself to use powers of 2. If you can only make a good estimate to start with, what do you think looks better, "approximately 96.240 GB" or "100 GB"?
It's not really false advertising when everyone does it the same way. I mean, you're not going to pay more for a "100 GB" drive only to find out it's the same size as the "96 GB" drive that was cheaper. There are no "96 GB" drives.
Re:Whats next? 56k!=56k/s? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ummm... (Score:4, Insightful)
In the computing world, the giga prefix means 2^30. In the physical world it means 10^9. Different contexts, different meanings. Give it up.
Re:SI definitions (Score:2, Insightful)
hard drive makers inconsistent on memory units (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's an example - this is a Maxtor data sheet [maxtor.com] that shows the details for this drive - they cleverly point out in very small print (I had to go to +4 magnification in xpdf to even read it) that GB = 1 billion bytes, but they make no claim about what MB means. The [maxtor.com]
front page for the drive doesn't mention it at all. I'm sure Maxtor is representative of all drive manufacturers in this regard.
How could that be? Hmmm.....
Re:SI definitions (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:From NIST... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they are lying. NIST probably isn't lying, technically, because of lack of requisite intent, but they're wrong here.
In computer science, a kilobyte 2^10 bits, a megabyte 2^20 etc. Always has been, always will be.
This isn't contradictory to the SI use, our words are very often used in very different ways in different contexts. Is a megalopolis a million cities? A megalomaniac a million maniacs? Of course not. People of normal intelligence shouldn't really have to have this explained to them.
In the world of digital computers, base10 units don't make much sense, so they aren't used. The prefixes are used to refer instead to the base 2 numbers that are important, and very close.
I don't remember anyone getting confused over this until the hard drive manufacturers decided to inflate their capacity figures some years back. A cheap trick that they then had to defend, so they and their shills have started laying on this crap real thick instead of just admitting the obvious. And they've even managed to flummox the NIST into thinking there was confusion here and they needed to rig a fix. So you get the silly hack you reference that practically no one has ever used or even heard of. It's not needed - the only source of confusion here is the harddisk manufacturers, and the solution is simple - they need to quit lying.
Its all about money (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, regardless of the outcome, both sides have to pay their legal people..
THIS is what we have reduced too in this country.
Re:SI definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
While we're bitching about misleading ads, (Score:3, Insightful)
KMFA you buttholes! How about plastering the TRUE viewable area all over the box.
I'm so bloody sick of all these deceptive practices. Just like gasoline, $1.49 and 9/10. Like you can buy gas in 9/10's of a cent at a time. It's a RIP OFF scheme. You lose 1/10 of a cent each gallon you buy. They GAIN 1/10 of a cent each gallon you buy. Over the long haul they haul tons of $$$$ to the bank..
Everyone has to be a thief these days..
If you must use the technology --You must first... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is plain ignorance, I hope we can teach as fast as we let them have the technology
"It's Unix or NoThing"
Re:...monitors should be next! (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Think of it this way... (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not so much an issue of not getting what you paid for, but an issue of always getting a bonus when you didn't realise it.
1024MB != 1GB (Score:1, Insightful)
They are powers of ten. They have been for a century, which by the way, is 100 years, not 102.4 years.
Using kilo for 1024 is a convenient, but sloppy, shortcut. It is also wrong.
Memory is constrained by the number of address pins, so powers of two are an inevitable consequence. We didn't use to have a shorthand term for large powers of two, so some people started misusing the names given to powers of ten. For memory, and memory only, it is an understandable shorthand to refer to the power of two closest to the power of ten that the prefix properly identifies. It is similar to the rounding that we commonly use in ordinary conversation, such as referring to a ton of bricks.
No other measure in a computer naturally falls into powers of two. Clocks frequencies don't. Data communications rates don't. And disk capacities don't. Using powers of two for anything other than address spaces is ignorant and misguided.
Suing people who are using the terms PROPERLY is insanely stupid.
Re:The PC/HD makers redefined squat. (Score:5, Insightful)
My production server at work has 24 gigabytes of RAM, by which I mean it has 24 x 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 bytes of RAM. I assume that you would claim this machine has 24 gibibytes of RAM, or that your desktop has 512 mebibytes of RAM, or that this particular object module is 72 kibibytes in size, then? If I started throwing around terms like that, people would look at me like I had gone completely batshit.
"megabyte" and "gigabyte", as they pertain to computer storage, have always been based off of multiples of 1024. This is different than the traditional meanings of these prefixes, but that's a separate issue (and it's hardly new; they've been around for more than fifty years.) What is new is how HDD manufacturers have silently discarded the existing meanings in order to artificially inflate the size of their media. This is a phenomenon that has come about only in recent years (i.e., in the past 5 years or so.) The fact that these manufacturers protest "But look! Technically, we're right!" is not particularly meaningful to me. 40 MB hard drives used to be 40 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. 512 MB of RAM is still 512 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, the same as it's always been. And you claim that "HD makers redefined squat?"
Another obvious example of this is CD-R versus DVD-R. A Yellow Book CD has a capacity of 650 MB, by which I mean 650 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, which is well above 650,000,000 bytes. DVD-R, on the other hand, which is advertised as a 4.7 GB medium, can only hold ~4.35 GB as gigabytes have traditionally been interpreted. So you've got one interpretation for CD-R, and another for DVD-R.
Now, you can crow about SI units all you want, and you can go around talking about how many mebibytes of RAM your laptop has and how many kibibytes this e-mail attachment consumes, but if you don't see that there has been a recent redefinition of standard computer terminology by media manufacturers to hype their products, then you are being either naive or deliberately obtuse.
Re:ads (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:The PC/HD makers redefined squat. (Score:1, Insightful)
Disk capacity is not a power of two. Hard drive geometry varies cylinder by cylinder. CD-ROMs store data on one continous spiral. The capacity can be any arbitrary number, and is not likely to naturally fall on a power of two. There's no inherent reason to mangle the SI prefixes into powers of two for something that ISN'T a power of two. Use the standard powers of ten.
The only place powers of two make sense in computers is those areas where the natural size is defined by the number of address pins.
Re:Unnecessary confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
Kibibytes? WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
I teach CS in a community college and I've got a whole bookshelf here of CS books and not one of them has any reference to this "kibi" notation. My Webster's New World Dictionary (c) 1988 defines "kilobyte n. 1. a unit of capacity, equal to 1,024 (2^10) bytes 2. loosely, one thousand bytes". Webopedia lists kilobyte as meaning 2^10, and has no entry for "kibibyte". Link. [webopedia.com]
This "kibibyte" notation is really very nonstandard and it's astonishing to see people incensed over the decades-old practice of "kilobyte = 1024 bytes".
Re:From NIST... (Score:1, Insightful)
There are two flaws in what you've said:
1. The standard when dealing in bytes has always been powers of two. Just because mega- or kilo- means something else in some other context doesn't make megabyte as base-10 "standard."
2. Nobody is trying to legislate the use of megabyte. What is illegal is deceptive marketing: deceptive marketing using the word megabyte the same sort of thing as deceptive marketing using the word gallon. It's no more illegal to use an incorrect definition of the gallon than it is to use the incorrect definition of the word megabyte. The context of this suit is important.
Further, whether or not pedants can contort megabyte into a measure in base-10 is irrelevant. Due to prior use, the base-2 definition is the commonplace and accepted one. In the context of drive manufacturers and others, the practice is actually deceiving people.
Pedantry about what mega- means doesn't change those facts, and that's what's important. In fact, the defendents in this case are rely on such hand-waving to make their actual deception OK. You're conflating two issues.
Re: Here you go. (Score:3, Insightful)
10h^3 = 16^3 = 4096 = 1000h
==> 10^3 = 1000 in all number systems excluding binary and ternary (which do not have a number "3")
Re:ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Joe Public buys an 80GB Hard drive and takes it home. When Windows Explorer opens, it tells him he has 74 odd GB of space.
Was he misled?
Base 1024 vs. base 1000, programmers vs. users (Score:3, Insightful)
And this shift to base 1000 should be easy to do. The power of modern software is in its ability to hide all the geeky details of the lower layers of the implementation (especially those in hardware). Since the average user does not think in base 2, the measurements reported by the user interface should not be expressed in base 2 terms.
Moverover, if the OS coders have done their job well, switching between base 1000 and base 1024 representations of memory and file sizes should be a simple matter of changing a single value in preference/defaults file someplace. In reality, I'd bet that divide-by-1024s are scattered throughout the code base. A simple grep for "1024" on the OS source code would reveal the poor level of reuse of code that converts integer bytes to kB/MB/GB notation.
Perhaps my rant is really about these poor engineering practices that create a confusing and inconsistent user experience. And these practices are worse than inconveniences. These are the same poor practices that have created input and buffer overrun security holes all over every operating system and application. Rather than patch a single, or a few, input buffer-handling code libraries to prevent overrun-based exploits, we seem to have to patch every single use of a buffer.
Re:Typical (Score:3, Insightful)
If you were English then I would expect you to spell the word "metre", but since they use the metric system about as often as you Americans do I would not worry too much about them. The American spelling of the word metre is "meter"; whether it is right or wrong is another matter. All I know is that every textbook I own spells it as meter and not metre.
And by the way, the word is "measurement". You would think that someone this caught up in spelling would be aware of that.
Re:Related pet peeve (Score:3, Insightful)
With GiB != GB: if the people think 1000MB == GB, they can only be positively surprised if they get a 100GB harddrive with 102400MB (or more, depending on the current MB). If they get a 100000MB drive, they should be OK. The people already aware of GiB should also know the hard-drive makers may mean GB when they write GB.
Really, I don't see that much of a difference between buying a hard-drive which may be smaller than I thought and buying a thing and paying more than I thought.
Re:pff (Score:3, Insightful)