Computer Makers Sued Over Misleading Hard Drive Sizes
from the about-time dept
Following the lawsuit where we find out it's okay for HP to sell a half-full ink cartridge while the box says "ink cartridge included" comes another class action lawsuit about deceptive PC maker practices. When you buy your PC, the hard drive size is one of the major selling points. However, when you turn on your shiny new PC, you inevitably find that the available hard drive space is noticeably smaller. Most people just ignore the difference, but now some people are suing Dell, Apple, Gateway, HP, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba for the practice. What they're doing, of course, is adding up the space in decimal format as opposed to binary. But, the computer is reading everything in binary, and so there's a bit of a difference. For obvious reasons, most people assume the results should be the same, but don't realize the slight shift in the numbers. This is, pretty clearly, a deceptive practice, but who knows what a jury will think. The companies will probably claim they do it because everyone else does, and it's the only way to be competitive. However, with the price of storage these days, does it really matter that much?
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Hard disk sizes are RIGHT
1 MiB = 1 Mebibyte = 2^20 bytes
1 GB = 1 Gigabyte = 10^9 bytes
1 GiB = 1 Gibibyte = 2^30 bytes
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decimal sizing standard practice
Industry nomenclature:
KB: 1024 bytes
MB: 1000 KB
GB 1000 MB
You want a real discrepancy, look at the difference between formatted/unformatted size!
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Re: decimal sizing standard practice
I'm tired of having to explain to people that paid me to buy and install an 80GB drive why it only shows up as 74GB in Windows.
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Re: decimal sizing standard practice
Simple example is on this Western Digital product page: http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/wd2500jd.asp
Same thing is on Dell's site as well. Not checking others, but know that I have seen it as well.
Nate
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Re: decimal sizing standard practice
Ever thought of charging 'em for the time you spend explaining?
That might make you less tired.
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That's KiB, not KB
1 KiB = 1 kibibyte = 1024 bytes
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