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.)

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: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...

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:That's what they want you to think

[Slime-dogg]

Then you just have the excuse to go for more than one. There are other methods too, including the big floppy and a small bit o' flash. ;-)

Re:Mine is only 3GB

[Neon Spiral Injector]

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

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: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.

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:ads

[arkanes]

Most of the boxes have fine print them already that says "1 megabyte is 1 million bytes" or something similar. At least the ones that I've seen.

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.

Re:ads

[xsbellx]

The HD companies are arguibly more correct in this case as they are using the definition that is used everywhere else.

No! They are not even close to being in the same galaxy as "more correct". Within the context of the computer world,

• 1K = 1024 or 2^10
• 1M = 1048576 or 2^20
• 1G = 1073741824 or 2^30
• 1T = 1099511627776 or 2^40

In case you hadn't noticed, hard drives are typically used and marketed within the context of the "computer world". 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).

However, since I, like most, purchased a hard drive to use within a computer, I expect the magnitude prefixes to accurately reflect the context of use, not some marketing scheme.

Re:ads

[DeeKayWon]

Within the context of the computer world,

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:ads

[SlugLord]

In the computer world, metric prefixes are base 10 when they refer to time or a rate and base 2 when they refer to data size.

Why?

Times/rates use base 10 because, as is suggested earlier, it's the standard for the metric system. It makes sense to have the same prefixes mean the same thing across the board. Since time is arbitrary anyway, it makes sense to use the "regular" metric prefixes.

Data size uses base 2 because of the way computers access memory. If you have a 8-bit address, you can have 256 chunks of memory. Likewise, if you have a 10-bit address, you can have 1024 chunks of memory. It takes the same number of address bits to have 1000 as it does to have 1024 and the hardware is generally simpler if you only deal with powers of 2. So since data-storage hardware is organized into groups that are powers of 2, it makes sense to use powers of 2 for the prefixes.

The argument is very much similar to the argument against the English system. Both systems are used because you want simple conversions. I have 1,000 fluid drams of something. How many fluid ounces is that? Likewise, if you always end up with 1024 units of something, why would you use 1000 as your base instead of 1024? Does it make more sense to have all of your data coming in multiples of 1.024 or in multiples of 1?

Hard drive manufacturers get away with it because hard drives aren't optimized in quite the same way as RAM. Hard drives are circular, so there's really very little benefit to making them contain 2^3n bits. You may end up dividing a hard drive in any event, and chances are your hard drive isn't exactly the maximum size your OS can handle. RAM, on the other hand, can easily be at the absolute maximum amount that a motherboard can handle. In that case, it makes sense to have 2^3n bits instead of 10^n bits. It needs the same size address and 2^3n is easier to manufacture, so ram always comes in powers of 2.

What came first?

[bluprint]

Mega means "1 million". Computer scientists started using the term Mega to identify 2^20, which isn't actually 1 million....they were approximating. In this case, it's the computer scientists who gave an alternate meaning to a common numerical term...not HD manufacturers.

Re:ads

[yanestra]

withing the context of the computer world

Bullshit.

• 1 k = 1e3
• 1 M = 1e6
• 1 G = 1e9
• 1 T = 1e12

But:

• 1 KiB = 1024
• 1 MiB = 1024^2
• 1 GiB = 1024^3
• 1 TiB = 1024^4

This was standardized years ago and is valid for all people*, not only engineers on one side or computer geeks on the other.

* = all people does not include citizens of the United States, because the U.S. have not yet introduced the internationally standardized metric system

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

[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: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:It's not the size of your disk

[SatanicPuppy]

I've always had such problems with RAIDs, etc, of finding an identical drive to plug in when one dies, that I've gotten in the habit of buying a couple at a time, and just leaving them on a shelf. The one time a customer called me on it, I pointed out that, since I was billing at 150.00 an hour, buying a drive 200 dollar drive that would save me 3 hours of work was a bargain for them.

Re:It's not the size of your disk

[kasperd]

This is why you should always make your logical raid volumes 1% smaller (approximately)

There is abut 7% difference between 2^30 and 10^9. I have seen disks being exactly 80*10^9 bytes, I believe they were sold as 80GB disks. If you find an 80GB disk which is really 80GB, you will have to leave 7% unused, that is 5.5GB waste.

Unnecessary confusion

[tarquin_fim_bim]

In SI units [ex.ac.uk] (which most civilised counties use) M means mega which is defined as 10^6, i.e. 1000000 , it is only the computer industry that deems K (1000) to equal 1024 which it does not, then extrapolates this to give 1M = 1024 x 1024. This is absolute rubbish, a different system of quantification should be used when referring to binary powers, as the borrowing of those from SI is clearly misleading.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[Stavr0]

Which is why they invented KiB, MiB, GiB [pcguide.com] which are 2^10 2^20 and 2^30.

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

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[Captain Rotundo]

I would support a government mandate that tech companies have to use binary SI prefixes on labels.
Mandating the current use of gigabyte but that it means 10^9 is too trouble some, but saying gibibytes is simple, people that don't care will either read it as "giga" not realizing, or be told by sales-people that its "the same thing". and they won't be surprised when the drive is the wrong size.

We have mandates on product labeling for many other products I think its time we force the industry to be upfront. Don't think this is an accident, the drive manufacturers knew EXACTLY what they were doing when they started using standard SI meanings for the prefixes, rather than the industry accepted practice.

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:Unnecessary confusion

[Izago909]

Look at the context. Most everything at the lowest level in a binary computer operates on the base 2 system. The ONLY reason that HD makers round like this is to make the marketing teams' job easier.

I also wouldn't get hasty about the government intervening on standards. If they really cared about universal standards, I'd be bitching about my car getting less than 9 kilometers to the liter. In fat, if they did step in, I'd be worried about them upholding the other standard.

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:Unnecessary confusion

[ncc74656]

Which is why they invented KiB, MiB, GiB

...which are ghey as hell and would've been unnecessary if the hard-drive manufacturers had been honest with the public all these years.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[jpallas]

This units issue has been covered before. [slashdot.org] There's even an actual standard [nist.gov].

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[Aglassis]

You said: This is absolute rubbish, a different system of quantification should be used when referring to binary powers, as the borrowing of those from SI is clearly misleading.

There is a system that isn't used by many people. For example, it uses kibibyte [wolfram.com] for 2^10 bytes and mebibyte [wolfram.com] for 2^20 bytes (and so on).

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[H1r0Pr0tag0n1st]

This is absolute rubbish, a different system of quantification should be used when referring to binary powers, as the borrowing of those from SI is clearly misleading.

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...

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[spamshir]

But suing computer makers? how is this going to keep hard drive, nay, computer costs down when the lawyer's fee are going to get admortised in to the costs?

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[PurpleBob]

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

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

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.

Re:Unnecessary confusion

[arose]

Capital "K" means kelvin.

SI definitions

[Chmarr]

Actually, 1000MB == 1GB...

you're probably thinking 1024MiB = 1GiB

If someone is suing Apple, etc, over the definition of 'mega', then they're going to lose.

Re:SI definitions

[Jucius Maximus]

I expect that this is really confusing for the typical customer. These are the observations I generally accept as true:

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.

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]

Re:SI definitions

[sootman]

What bugs *me* about MP3 players is the way when they first started coming out, they said a 32 MB model could hold "up to an hour of CD-quality music" which is BS because a 128k mp3 takes 1 MB per minute, so 32 MB ~= 1/2 hour. You'd have to encode your music at 64 kbps to fit 1 hour onto a 32 MB device. It's questionable to call a 128k mp3 "cd-quality" but a 64k mp3? No f'ing way.

DVDs: 1000MB = 1GB

[achurch]

For CD-R, DVD-R/w, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB

You'd be surprised: all the writable DVDs I have claim 4.7GB but offer 4,700,000,000 (+/- a tiny amount) bytes = 4.3*2^30. (CDs, on the other hand, do use 1024: the "700MB" CDs I use are 736,966,656 (data) bytes = 703*2^20.

Good lord, this is confusing...

CD/DVD capacities

[David Jao]

4. For CD-R, DVD-R/w, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB

No! CD-R uses binary prefixes and DVD-R uses decimal prefixes. Actually, in reality, both CD-R and DVD-R capacity labels are inaccurate under either the binary or the decimal interpretation, but you have to really be splitting hairs to notice.

The exact expected capacity of normal sized CD-Rs (not counting overburning, yadda yadda) is as follows:

• For 74 minute CD-Rs, the capacity is 74*60*44100*2*2*2048/2352 = 681984000 bytes, or 650.390625 binary MiB (exactly, no roundoff error).
• For 80 minute CD-Rs, the capacity is 80*60*44100*2*2*2048/2352 = 737280000 bytes, or 703.125 binary MiB (again, this figure is exact, not rounded off).

For DVD+/-R[W] media, the exact capacity is 4697620480 bytes, or just shy of 4.7 decimal GB. The capacity of a DVD-R is certainly nowhere near 4.7 binary GB.

I find it ironic...

[sheetsda]

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

Re:SI definitions

[black mariah]

I doubt it. Megabyte and Gigabyte are used in the computer industry to denote specific sizes, and have been for many years. This is like getting screwed over at a gas station because some dumbass decided that a gallon was equal to a pint because some Sumerian chicken measurements used a GAL prefix or something equally stupid.

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.

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.

apple says

[photoblur]

According to Apple's website [apple.com]

1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.

it's in the fine print at the bottom of the above linked page

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 t

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

RIAA chuckles in background

[Lord_Dweomer]

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

Oh the horror!!!!!!!!

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.

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" !

Re:Fine Print

[OverlordQ]

It's already there on every hard drive box, it says something along the lines of "The Manufacturer considers 1GB to equal 1000MB"

Another reason why we need tort reform

[winkydink]

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

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: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

...monitors should be next!

[DevNull]

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

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.

Re:...monitors should be next!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

15.7" of course being the diagonal measurement because everyone knows it's natural to measure the size of a rectangle by its diagonal.

This is lawsuit material?

[weston]

Anyone who can understand that there's a difference between deciding a KB is 1000 bytes vs 1024 bytes should also know better than to make this into a lawsuit. I'll bet the motivation isn't even so much to screw consumers as to avoid confusing them. Once your average american on the street groks the metric system, explaining that we're working with multiples of 2^10 instead of 10^3 isn't going play well.

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...

[ADRA]

those hard drives that are sold as 80gb drives, but have 20GB partitions allocated for the OS 'backup'. That's my pet peave. Luckally I don't buy systems with that 'feature'

If PDA manufacturers can get sued for it, why not their desktop counterparts?

gotta love

[_avs_007]

those systems that ship with 128mb or more of memory, but in the fine print says part of it is shared with the Video Card.

I remember a long time ago my IBM PCjr had 128k of memory, but 16k of it was shared with the display card, such that only 112 was available. Consequently, many PC software apps that required 128k of ram didn't work. Thank god for the sidecar memory expansion kit :)

From NIST...

[wirelessbuzzers]

From NIST [nist.gov]

Unit Prefix Abbreviation
2^10 kibi Ki
2^20 mebi Mi
2^30 gibi Gi
2^40 tebi Ti
2^50 pebi Pi
2^60 exbi Ei

Examples and comparisons with SI prefixes

1 Kibit = 2^10 bit = 1024 bit
1 kbit = 10^3 bit = 1000 bit
1 MiB = 2^20 B = 1 048 576 B
1 MB = 10^6 B = 1 000 000 B
1 GiB = 2^30 B = 1 073 741 824 B
1 GB = 10^9 B = 1 000 000 000 B

In particular, 20 GB = 18.6 GiB. So, they're telling the truth, albeit in a not-so-honest way; it's really the disk info page that's lying.

It's also worth noting that EXT2 and some other UNIX-based filesystems reserve a certain percent of the space; this makes their available capacity smaller for non-root users.

Re:From NIST...

[Arker]

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

This has always irritated me.

[Cyberllama]

I mean, who decided you could do this? My 120 gig drive is really only 112 gigs. If I sold gasoline for 1.29 a gallon, then put a little footnoot on my sign that said "*Gallon is used to mean 32 oz" you better believe I'd be sued. You can't just redefine things like that -- its deceptive. How many people buy 120 gig hard drivers not realizing they're really only getting 112 gigabytes?

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. . .

Re:This has always irritated me.

[OverlordQ]

I mean, who decided you could do this? My 120 gig drive is really only 112 gigs.

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.

The PC/HD makers redefined squat.

[DeeKayWon]

Your 120 gig hard drive is 120 gigbytes, as advertised. That translates to about 112 gibibytes. The companies who are misrepresenting the size of drives are the ones who write software that use "gigabyte" to mean "gibibyte".

Consider my newest hard drive. Western Digital, who manufactured it, says it's 120GB. Windows 2000, written by Microsoft, tells me it's 111GB. Wieghing in the fact that it's slightly over 120,000,000,000 bytes, it's apparent to me that Western Digital is right and Microsoft is wro

Re:The PC/HD makers redefined squat.

[cje]

A gibibyte? Jesus. I'm aware that these are standard SI terms, but at some point you've got to let common sense step in.

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:This has always irritated me.

[iggymanz]

actually, it's we computer people who invented the very FALSE notion that 120 gig is 120 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024. We redefined (being lazy S.O.B.'s) the meaning of gig from its true meaning of 10^9 to 2^30, mega from 10^6 to 2^20, kilo from 10^3 to 2^10. So now marketers find it to their advantage to use the TRUE meaning of the word and you cry "lies"? The majority opinion of science and engineering votes against us.

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!

Sue the auto manufacturers as well?

[EmpNorton]

Car, truck, and motorcycle represent their motors rounded usually to the nearest 100. My 1100cc motorcycle is actually onlt 1085cc. Isnt this sort of behavior rampany? Are 50mg pills always 50mg? Certainly 2x4 lumber is not actually 2x4. I would think making everything absolutely accurate would simple confuse the average consumer.

This just seems silly.

Re:Sue the auto manufacturers as well?

[_avs_007]

If you were going to sue the automakers, at least sue them for making the Speedomoter and/or fuel gage inaccurate.

I read an article Consumer Reports a while back saying the european makers are the worst when it comes to the speedo reading a speed that is higher than what you are traveling. I remember it saying that for post 1995 cars, GM had the most accurate speedos with dead-on readings at 60 and overstated by 1mph at 100mph, followed by Toyota and Honda which overstated the speed by 2 at 60mph and 5 mph

Apple...

[myrdred]

Heh, I remember when Apple actually did it THE OTHER way. I was trying to look up a Maxtor 4.0 GB HD that shipped in one of my macs, and could not find any mention of such a hd. The Apple specs clearly said it was 4.0 GB. But it turned out that Maxtor classified these as 4.3GB, whereas apple used the 1024 size cound, rather than the 1000 that maxtor used. Heh.

They used to do even more

[quacking duck]

According to the Mac Secrets book, a decade ago Apple shipped systems with monitors listed with the correct size--if it was 12" viewable, it was marketed as 12" instead of 13" like everyone else in the industry did. From a marketing standpoint of course consumers thought they were getting better value on the monitor.

So Apple went with the flow and started marketing 12" monitors as 13". And for a time it was good.

Until the industry got slapped with a deceptive advertising suit or something. But rather than market it CORRECTLY, now more ink is wasted when ads are printed with disclaimers, like "* 18.1" viewable" on 19" CRT screens.

Re:Apple...

[green pizza]

Apple used to label their monitors that way too. At one point Apple sold 12", 16" and 19" monitors (the same monitors their competitors called 14", 17", and 20"). AFAIK, Apple only ever labeled one of their monitors a 15", they generally referred to that size as 13" or 14".

Then there's the goofy... there was a time when Apple's imaging software used a fixed partition size. So if they ran out of hard drives from vendor X, they would just use the same exact partition on a larger drive from vendor Y...... so rather than getting a 4.0 GB Seagate, you may actually have gotten a 4.5 GB Quantum with a single 4.0 GB partition.

Lawsuits to protect the stupid

[El]

As long as they tell you their "20GByte" drive is actually 20,000,000,000 bytes unformated (which Maxtor does), then I don't see the problem. I was under the impression that every hard driver manufacturer used a multiplier of 1000 instead of 1024, in which case it is pretty hard to call this anticompetive behaviour. In fact, it is just the opposite -- every manufacturer was forced to use this definition to avoid unfavorable price/size comparisons with other vendors.

Good grief, Charlie Brown...

[The Master Control P]

Can you say "frivilous lawsuit?" We've got the RIAA, the "Patriot" act and SCO out there, and they're suing over 1000 vs 1024? My thoughts:

* 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.

Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, etc are NOT SI standards

[fredrikj]

A lot of people here have claimed that the *bi prefixes are SI standards. They aren't. They're IEC standards.

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."

Download a patch to increase the size of your ....

[G4from128k]

This whole powers of 1000 vs. powers of 1024 for sizes is silly. The disk makers report capacities based on powers of 1000 (standard SI definition of mega, giga, etc.) and the OS reports sizes based on powers of 1024. Presto chango, a brand new 200 GB (GB = 1000^3) drive reports that it has 186 GB (GB = 1024^3) of space after formatting.

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.

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."

Argh!

[OrangeHairMan]

1000 MB != 1 GB

YES IT DOES! It's 1024 MiB that equals 1 GiB. 1000 MB is a perfect way to describe 1 GB.

While we're bitching about misleading ads,

[pair-a-noyd]

Let's go after them about monitor (and TV) sizes. This shit about a 17" monitor (or whatever) is bullshit. Sure the tube is 17" OUT OF THE FUCKING BEZEL! Then they put in small print * 15.2" viewable *

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..

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!

Apple will have no problem.

[Xenex]

At the bottom of each [apple.com] one [apple.com] of [apple.com] their [apple.com] product [apple.com] pages [apple.com], it states:

1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.

Re:i don't get it

[King_TJ]

What's not to get? It's like most computer industry lawsuits.... Nit-picking over small details in an attempt to earn notoriety and profit.

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

[badasscat]

Thats just stupid. I think the lawsuit is innapropriate.

HD manufacturers always measuered their disks like that.

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 binary switchover happened as a marketing scheme sometime between 100MB and 1GB - it was at one of those two milestones, as one of the major manufacturers wanted bragging rights getting there first, as I recall. Since then, all sorts of revisionist history has been written claiming that 1GB was really 1,000MB all along when it plain and simply is not true.

Look, whatever the dictionary tells you "giga" means, this is a technical term that means something else in the computer world, and has always meant something else in the computer world. The same way that words like "token ring" don't mean the same thing in PC land as they do in real life. If you bought a "token ring adapter" from Cisco and opened the box to find a device that allowed you to slip a Cracker Jack box toy ring over your finger, would you not feel a bit deceived?

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

[mindriot]

Yeah, but look who they're suing. Not really many HD manufacturers. Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba. OK, IBM does make HDs. But these companies sell complete PC systems. And therein lies the problem.

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.

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

[eht]

Even IBM doesn't make hard drives anymore, they sold everythign off to Hitachi. Even support for IBM hard drives have been sold off to Hitachi it looks like.

/. article here [slashdot.org]

hard drive makers inconsistent on memory units

[abe ferlman]

Unless they've got some strange units of memory (someone please correct me if this is the case), their memory cache sizes are measured in powers of two but their drive storage sizes are measured in powers of ten.

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.....

Its all about money

[nurb432]

Of course this is stupid.. But it makes the attorneys some quick spending cash.

Remember, regardless of the outcome, both sides have to pay their legal people..

THIS is what we have reduced too in this country.

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:About TIME!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... let's see:

• Dell [One gigabyte (GB) equals one thousand megabytes (MB).]
• Apple [1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.]
• IBM [GB means 1 thousand million bytes when referring to hard drive capacity. Accessible capacity may vary]
• HP [GB (Gigabyte) - 1024 megabytes, 2^10 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.]

...looks like most of the industry learned their lesson from the monitor fiasco a few years ago.
Now, if you'll forgive me, I'll get back to looking at my 19.96-inch monitor and spinning my 73.47-times-2^10-times-2^10-times-8-bit (post-formatted capacity, using a single ext3 partition, your results may vary, not valid in Utah) hard-disk drive.

Re:Step in the right direction

[arose]

As bits and bytes aren't SI units they have nothing to do with "proper SI"

Re:Ummm...

[dirty]

Man you GiB fan boys amaze me. As has been said 100 times already, bytes are not SI units, the SI prefixes do not apply. They are not metric units. A byte is a computer unit. We do this all the time in every day life, the same word can have different meanings in different contexts. If your NRA buddy is talking about a new rack, he could be refering to a gun rack. A nerd friend might be talking about a server rack. Another friend could be talking about a woman's breasts. It's the same word, but with different meanings.

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:Ummm...

[winkydink]

If you wish to beat me over the head with your analogy, how about making it a valid one? Adjectives and nouns are not the same thing. If I say you have a big gun, a big server, or big breasts, the word big means the same darn thing in all three contexts.

Re:Ummm...

[connsmythe96]

giga- is not an adjective. It is a prefix.

Re:1024MB != 1GB

[Elf-friend]

Unless I am wrong, though, the byte is not SI. The SI quantifiers only act as defined within the environment of SI, and so may act differently with bytes. In other words, the terms "kilobyte," "megabyte," "gigabyte," and "terabyte" have no defined SI meaning. This is similar to a U.S. hundredweight weighing 100 lbs., and an Imperial one weighing 112.

The computer science community has accepted, by long use, the definition of 1KB=2^10 bytes. This means that, although it is inconsistent with the SI definitions of the quantifiers, this is a de facto industry standard; one which hardware manufacturers have intentionally defied for years. That this is not the SI meaning of those quantifiers is a moot point.