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Seagate lawsuit concludes, settlement announced
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 26th October 2007
Apparently caveat emptor doesn’t apply to storage devices.
US customers who purchased a Seagate hard drive, either OEM or retail (but not pre-installed in a machine) between March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007 from an authorized Seagate retailer are entitled to one of two settlement options:
The first option is a cash benefit, which entitles eligible customers to 5 percent cash back on the price they paid for the hard drive, pretax. Claims must be filed via a mail-in form available on the settlement site linked above.
The second option is a software benefit and entitles eligible customers to a free copy of the Seagate Software Suite, which carries a retail value of $40. Claims for the software benefit can be filed online.
The case is centered around the difference between a gigabyte at 1,000,000,000 bytes and a binary gigabyte at 1,073,741,824 bytes. This difference has been known for years and is common among all hard drive manufacturers. Hard drive manufacturers measure and advertise their GB’s in base10 while most operating systems, including all versions of Windows and MacOS, measure their GB’s in base2 – the binary number system consisting of 1’s and 0’s that resides at the ground level of all computer functioning.
Megabyte for megabyte the difference is completely negligible, but with both Seagate and Western Digital joining Hitachi in the 1TB hard drive market, that minor size difference can add up quickly (just over 68.5GB on a 1TB drive; there’s just under a 7% discrepancy between a base10 GB and a base2 GB)
Post-lawsuit requirements of Seagate require them to not only correct the advertisement mistake for future drives and provide the listed benefits to customers, but they must also pay the plaintiff’s legal fees – and it's no pocket change at $1.8 million. However, many questions are left: will other hard drive manufacturers soon hear from lawyers? Will Microsoft be sued for the FAT system which consumes a portion of space relative to a drive’s size to map out a storage device?
Do you think that this lawsuit is a load of bologna or has it been in the making for many years? Let us know how you feel over in the forums.
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Comments (36)
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The binary prefixes (kibi/ki=2^10, mebi/Mi=2^20, gibi/Gi=2^30, tebi/Ti=2^40) were meant to resolve the ambiguity, but haven't really been widely adopted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
Given HDD manufacturers have AFAIK always used decimal prefixes, surely that is established market practice. It is no less correct to say 1GB=10^9 bytes than to say 1GB=2^30 bytes, so I think Seagate have come off quite badly out of this case. That said, how much will it _actually_ cost them in cash rebates? How many people will actually go to the bother of digging out the receipt (assuming they still have it) for their $100 HDD and posting it to Seagate for the sake of a 5% rebate? Not many I'll bet. Bear in mind the "$40" software actually costs them nothing but bandwidth (if, as I assume, it is downloadable) or packaging (if physical media).
should affect other manufacturers surely...maybe seagate could pay a member of the public to sue samsung, toshiba, et al....
Gah, just thinking of the amount of time over the years i must have spent trying to explain to less technically minded people why the device they just bought does not have the space it was advertised as having, makes me annoyed
People generally can understand why the filesystem uses up space (i tended to explain it as think of a warehouse, but with a small section of it used to note down the name and location of everything in said warehouse)
But explaining the 1024mb vs 1000mb difference just leaves people thinking they've been cheated out of space.
*looks at his 1GB SD card that has 982mb capacity*
imagine if the RAM manufacturers did the same thing, there'd be all kinds of oddly-sized memory amounts in people's PCs ;)
Sure.. I see both sides of the argument. I guess I just don't sweat the small stuff like that. An HDD is just that; an HDD. I use it till it goes poof, then get another. I can see why people would get upset that they aren't getting what is on the box; at least in its entirety. I dunno. Personally, I always compensate for what I need when buying drives, and always shoot higher than what I'm targeting to make up for that 'deviance' in space versus advertised space.
Its been known for a long time that this is what you get when you formatt a hard drive. I'm a huge fan of Seagate, and only purchase their drives, so I would be "entitled" to pretty decent chunk of change from this lawsuit as I've purchase many, many drives in that time frame. However I will be punish Seagate for ignorance of retarded consumer and a messed up court system.
I'm standing by Seagate!
Seagate got sued because their customers lack education? that sounds...reasonable.... :|
Shouldn't wheel/tire manufacturers be sued because they sell 19" wheels? With the rubber on them they aren't 19" now are they? (ok, so the customer gets more diameter for their money, but still.)
OH! Someone should sue makers of toilet paper as well. The cardboard core creates a void where it should be paper!
I hate this suing culture! I'm pretty sure that the general population gets more stupid for each day that pass. (Or is this just a result of the fact that every 12 year old kid are a "computer expert"? )
I totally suing the crap out of Charmin now.
who wants to bet that shortly microsoft either
A: bring out a new section in their windows eula that reliefs them of any responsibility
or
B: bring out a new format for hdds that doesn't take so much space (as unlikely as that is you have to give them some options)
but does this mean that WD and other companies are up next on the lawsuit band to get sued for the same reasons and if so does that mean we will finally see the Actual listed amount of space on HDD boxes, I kinda hope so.
heh :D ....well i found it funny...
That's because you're a beefcake
whilst reading that my mind slowly seized up and just said "wtf"
that is exactly what I was thinking, woot $5
Keeping this in mind it should be clear to see that changing the way they market their drives is really what should happen (and as said above should have happened from the start) From seagate's perspective they could care less if they have to give 5% back for drives purchased. For the most part consumers will continue to buy seagate because they know they make quality drives. In fact forcing seagate to use base 2 will most likely boost sales from anyone like me who loathes the fact that they (along with all other drive manufacturers) used to use base 10 representation.
When you look at the bottom line:
1) It should have been this way from the start.
2) 'Greedy Americans' are going to get about enough money back to buy a McDonalds combo to eat themselves into an early grave (Note that I am an American and am purely joking)
3) The amount paid back (including legal fees) by Seagate will surely not even bother them financially as it's pretty much pocket change for them
4) Die hard seagate fans like me will now be advocating that they are doing 'the right thing' and will most likely boost their overall sales.
And, for the most part, I'm pretty certain the majority of the claimants will opt for the free software. That seems to be the least hassle for all parties involved. Click on a link they send you and download the software instead of dealing with all that red tape.
Oh, I'm only assuming they will provide a link for the software download.. They wouldn't be stupid enough to actually snail mail the software to every single claimant out there now, would they?