Seagate Finally Gets Nailed for Dishonest Marketing
Have you ever bought a hard drive that didn't seem as large as was advertised? Why is my 80 gigabyte hard drive showing less than 75 actual gigabytes?
The reason is that companies like Seagate define their gigabytes by a standard that no one but hard drive manufacturers use which is this:
Hard drive manufacturers – 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
The rest of the world – 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes
The first, while semantically correct, has no bearing on computing terms at all and is highly misleading. Though the term "giga" technically means 1 billion, in computing terms 1 gigabyte is 1024 megabytes which translates to the second number you see there. For a hard drive manufacturer to play with numbers like that, I say they deserve some retribution.
In this case, they've settled on a class action lawsuit (without admitting any fault of course). Customers of Seagate will be able to get a 5% refund on Hard drives they've purchased… assuming they find out about the settlement of course.
That said, to see the settlement information, go to this site.
Tags: Hard Drives, Market Lies, Seagate