Seagate pays the price for quoting misleading hard-drive capacities.

[Dorza]

Not being funny or anything but its not a challenge. It's simple. Just quote 465GiB as apposed to 500GB. Joe average will just remove the i and assume GB as they have always done. And to be perfectly honest, I doubt that many look at and understand what a GB is. They just see a HDD capacity number and go with what they think is best for them. What will happen when Tera byte storage is wide spread? The "T" in place of the "G" will completely flummox them.

It's the same as HD-DVD. To them it just means better image.

[Steve B]

It's the same as HD-DVD. To them it just means better image.

I had to watch a mate who works in blockbuster explain to a customer why a Blu-Ray disk which they had brought to the counter wouldn't work in a normal DVD Player.

[UltraMagnus]

giga is a base 10 prefix, therefore hard drive manufacturers are right.

just because chip and OS manufacturers bastardized the base 10 prefix doesn't make them right.

[Izmunuti]

giga is a base 10 prefix, therefore hard drive manufacturers are right.

just because chip and OS manufacturers bastardized the base 10 prefix doesn't make them right.

No they're not, a byte is built on base 2 numbering, therefore base 10 calculations are irrelevant.

[Zak33]

I feel for Seagate. I really do.

It's not really fair but they're big enough to stand up and take it like men.

[ta2]

So are they going to go after PC vendors like Dell, Apple, HP etc? I doubt it. These parties are just as guilty as Seagate for any problems.

[MadduckUK]

its 5% or something they have to reimburse the customers isnt it? so if the average HDD is going for £50/$50 or whatever then thats £2.50? i would think most people wouldn't bother?

[badass]

The only reason people thnink its acceptable that HDD manufacturers use Base 10 for quoting capacities is that for as long as most of us can remember, they have been doing it.
The whole kiB/KB thing was created long after the HDD manufacturers decided to use a completely different base for their capacities to every other computer component that has a capacity quoted
For example, RAM and ROM/FLASH.

So, the history goes something like this:

Everyone uses base2
HDD manufacturers decide to use Base10 because it misleadingly gives larger numbers.
This goes on for many years
Some people decide to create the KiB/MiB/GiB and that they represent base2 whilst conventions that always previously referred to base2 now refer to base10.
Seagate get screwed in court for quoting capacities of their HDD's that no one bar HDD manufacturers recognises.

Remember people, just because something has been going on for ages does not make it acceptable.
They always have been misleading people and only those very knowledgable in it know iwhat it actually means.

Just imagine I sell mineral water by the gallon in the UK. All other mineral water manufactureres also do. What I don;t make clear is that I mean the smaller US gallon. I continue this for years. SUddenly its acceptable to do this?

[UltraMagnus]

no, the thing is, that giga, is a base ten metric prefix that has been used since before the invention of the computer, just because most people decided to bastardize it for use on base 2 does not make it right. the correct prefix for binary is gibi.

[ta2]

The whole kiB/KB thing was created long after the HDD manufacturers decided to use a completely different base for their capacities to every other computer component that has a capacity quoted
For example, RAM and ROM/FLASH.

RAM comes in powers of two because it is cheaper and more efficient to arrange data banks like that. The same is true of EEPROM and FLASH (usually). Magnetic and optical storage, however, is not like this. Lets take a historic look at other types of storage:

3.5 inch "1.44MB" Floppy - 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 bytes = 1,474,560 bytes = 1.40625MiB
DVD-R "4.7GB" Disc - 4,707,319,808 bytes = 4.384GiB
My "160GB" HDD - 160,006,500,352 bytes = 149.018GiB

CD's are the odd one out, they are quoted with the binary interpretations, a 650MB CD-ROM is infact just over 650MiB.

Seagate shouldn't be penalised for following the trend which has been going on for decades.

[Dorza]

I had to watch a mate who works in blockbuster explain to a customer why a Blu-Ray disk which they had brought to the counter wouldn't work in a normal DVD Player.

Yep, I have a mate who works there too. I've heard the stories...some are still requesting VHS and don't know what DVDs are.

[Nemz0r]

It actually explains that there will be less than 500GiB on the Seagate HDD boxes; we were discussing on another forum - we came to the conclusion that Seagate would almost definitely win the case, however it was cheaper for them to just do some refunds instead of paying the lawyers fees etc.

It's really the operating system's/bios'/whatever's fault for saying Gb when it should be GiB. Seagate and other manufacturers are perfectly correct to say 500Gb, because; it does indeed have 500Gb; 500,000Mb; 500,000,000Kb; 500,000,000,000Bytes. It actually has a few more than that iirc. It doesn't however have 500GiB; 500,000Mibi; 500,000,000Kibi.

Just someone milking Seagate on erm, I don't know the word, but when you know they will bow to your wishes because although they are right and you are wrong, but it would cost them more to prove they're right than just say "yeah whatever, here have some cash". There is a word for that, or short sentence right?

[Sierro]

I heard about this yesterday from a friend, I couldn't believe it. As you say there's nothing wrong with the reported size of the disks.

It reminds me of the people who bought the Athlon XP chips wondering why their 1400+ didn't run at 1.4GHz...

[ajones]

So when do we start seeing the lawyers arguing about misrepresentation of the term Byte?

It's difficult to track down the true origin of this term; I myself was always taught that a byte was the number of bits that made up the width of your data bus. Therefore, in an 8-bit system, a byte was 8 bits or an octet. In a 32 bits system, a byte would be 32 bits or 4 octets.

[Steve]

I myself was always taught that a byte was the number of bits that made up the width of your data bus. Therefore, in an 8-bit system, a byte was 8 bits or an octet. In a 32 bits system, a byte would be 32 bits or 4 octets.

Surely that's a word? Word size is system dependant.

[UltraMagnus]

i always thought that what you were describing was a word. and that a byte was 8 bits and a nibble was 4 bits