Computer Makers Sued Over Hard-Drive Size Claims

[draggoon01]

who cares about hd space, there's so much of it anyway. what i'm pissed about is when i bought a 33.6 kb modem and it only downloaded at like 3kb. i'm gonna sue over that one...

 

[modedepe]

O..M..G..these people are retarded. Read the freaking label on a harddrive. Or hell, read a freaking dell ad. They say right at the bottom that for hard drives 1gb = 1 billion bytes. This is pathetic. Freaking ambulance chasing lawyers make me sick.

 

[fredtam]

Maybe the proper people to sue would be the educational system for not educating these people in basic mathematics. There are tons of conversions that need to be made to completely understand hardware. Next they will be suing AMD because They saw 2500 on the box and did not get 2500MHz. Its bad enough that newspapers have to be written on a 9th grade level. I hope they don't take something that is technical in nature and dumb it down for the masses. Most people have no concept of how much can be stored on a 120Gb drive anyway and have no need for it other than to say thay have 120Gb.

 

[SgtZulu]

How come I'm not suprised that at least one of the plaintiffs is jewish :disgust:

 

[draggoon01]

although i do think that as drives get bigger this problem/issue/trick gets more and more annoying...

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: SgtZulu
How come I'm not suprised that at least one of the plaintiffs is jewish :disgust:

Banned.

 

[Excelsior]

Originally posted by: Nebor

Originally posted by: SgtZulu
How come I'm not suprised that at least one of the plaintiffs is jewish :disgust:

Banned.

Do you know for sure he is banned?

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Aboroth
"Giga" and "Mega" have ALWAYS meant something else in the computer world, and probably will for a very long time. They are technical terms specific to computer systems. It was understood and accepted until hard drive manufacturers wanted to inflate their hard drive sizes and trick people into thinking their hard drives were bigger than they actually were.

Hard drive manufacturers then had to justify their lying, and if I remember correctly, Gibi and Mebi didn't even exist until 1998, long after their number games started. Also FYI, those prefixes are IEC, not SI.

They didn't do anybody any favors. All they did was add confusion and lots of posts in forums from newbies like, "Where did all my hard drive space go???", and conflicts with countless pages of already written documentation.

I'm not saying that this lawsuit isn't stupid, however. They aren't even suing the hard drive manufacturers.

Well said!

If we were gonna go with 1 GB == 1.000 MB == 1.000.000 KB we should have done so from the start, changing it now, ala mebi/gibi/whatever is just stupid, the binary system is working just fine.

And those people are morons.
The fact that anyone even tries to sue over something that stupid says something about the American legal system.

 

[magomago]

Yeah - I remember looking at my 2000jb box and it explains that and as long as they have that...um no lawsuit.

Maybe Linux and Longhorn will change to that - though it'll be interesting to see our file sizes increase all the sudden

 

[mrgoblin]

I think this is completely feasable and you people shouldnt be making light of this. 80 gig is 80 gig and not 40 or 73 as it may be. They need to add more space to those drives to make it 80 because that is complete bs. I dont see them lying in the scsi industry and I dont see why they should be allowed to ly to the consumers. I say sue em till theyre all broke and intel makes hd's

 

[dman]

Joy. I am split on this issue, but, I think the best solution would be to have a consumer OS (like windows) display the GB size as the HDD manuf. indicate it.

 

[trevinom]

I've noticed that mention of the actual FAT tables has not been used as a reason for the lower resultant space. If I'm not mistaken some of the space gets used in the process of cutting up the harddrive into chunks, and assigning them an address that the operating system can use.

Just my 2 cents' worth.

 

[Tab]

Originally posted by: magomago
Yeah - I remember looking at my 2000jb box and it explains that and as long as they have that...um no lawsuit.

Maybe Linux and Longhorn will change to that - though it'll be interesting to see our file sizes increase all the sudden

I hope so How big are single sectors?

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: mrgoblin
I think this is completely feasable and you people shouldnt be making light of this. 80 gig is 80 gig and not 40 or 73 as it may be. They need to add more space to those drives to make it 80 because that is complete bs. I dont see them lying in the scsi industry and I dont see why they should be allowed to ly to the consumers. I say sue em till theyre all broke and intel makes hd's

Actually SCSI drives also have sizes specified with the 1 MB == 1.000 KB etc system.

The reason they're 36 GB, 72 GB, etc instead of 40, 80, etc is cause they have differently sized platters, typically 18 GB for 15K drives and 36 GB for 10K drives.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: grrl
This is why we need a national holiday declaring open season on lawyers for one day a year.

just _one_ day?

 

[DeeTees]

My god! The year 2K problem is comming in just 45 years, will we be ready?

 

[Lonyo]

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

But we're not allowed to infringe copyrights.


Anyway, some of the space you "lose" is also lost due to formatting.
And when people say "I only got 140GB on my 150GB HDD" they are lying anyway.

They only got 140GiB on their 150GB HDD, they did get 150GB. If the lawsuit is worded wrong, it should be thrown out of court anyway.
Is it the PC makers responsibility to educate the users about different notations of computer sizes?

 

[madthumbs]

Originally posted by: Lonyo

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

But we're not allowed to infringe copyrights.


Anyway, some of the space you "lose" is also lost due to formatting.
And when people say "I only got 140GB on my 150GB HDD" they are lying anyway.

They only got 140GiB on their 150GB HDD, they did get 150GB. If the lawsuit is worded wrong, it should be thrown out of court anyway.
Is it the PC makers responsibility to educate the users about different notations of computer sizes?

-If the hard drive manufacturers can "word" it correctly, then the PC manufacturers should be held to wording it correctly as well!

 

[Zepper]

To the modem whiner: b=bits, B=bytes. So 33.6kb/sec is kilobits/sec - your download rate is stated in kB/sec or kiloBytes/sec so you would expect about 3.3kB/sec max thruput on tightly compressed files. . Each modem byte actually takes 10 bits: 8 data, 1 stop, 1 parity.
. To the drive size whiners: 1kB=1024 (or 2^10) Bytes, 1MB=1048576 (or 2^20) Bytes, 1GB=1024MB (or 2^30) Bytes. Thus was cyberspace formed to the base two at the beginning and for the forseeable future, so shall it remain (until we start getting multi-state logic computers, what then).
. Don't even get me started on tape drives (sizes advertised in compressed bytes at a comp rate that is seldom achieved)...
. For the type of fora these are, the technical/mathematical illiteracy rate is quite astonishing.
.bh.

 

[yak8998]

Lanchau Dan, Adam Selkowitz, Tim Swan and John Zahabian

hunt em down and kill them. whoever said the thing about this being the pc version of the mcdonalds case is right. Do they really need 7gb more of porn?

 

[PowerMacG5]

Originally posted by: Blastman

Originally posted by: ElFenix the computer guys got it wrong. the REAL standard of gigabyte is 1 billion bytes. not 1073747824 bytes. in fact all the manufacturers even state what a REAL gigabyte is. the hard drive makers are right, the computer user AND the operating system are wrong. if this thing isn't tossed by the judge i'll be amazed.

Exactly. It?s Microsoft that need to update their operating system to reflect GB = 1,000,000,000. All international standards say a kilobyte is 1000 bytes ? not 1024. Kilo- is a Greek prefix meaning 1000 ? not 1024. Likewise a MB would be = 1,000,000 and so on. It seems to me that calling a kilobyte 1024 bytes is a leftover dinosaur from the past because memory was made in 256, 512, 1024 ? etc. chunks ? and 1024 was ? "about" ? a 1000, ? so we used an easier and rough estimation that was not precisely correct.. It's a redefinition that I think needs to be dropped. 1000=1000 whether your counting in binary, hex or whatever. So what if it doesn't make for nice even numbers in binary. If I say I have 6,400,000,000 bytes ? is that 6.4GB or 5.96GB or even 6,103.5MB???? The translation is clumsy if I use the "computer" conventions and wrong if I stick to the technically proper usage of GB. If I write it out as 6,400,000,000 bytes ?well it's 6,400,000,000 bytes. But if I abbreviate it, it's all of sudden it's 5.96GB? The common usage of the term seems to be changing as evidenced by disk drive manufactures.

So now Microsoft is to blame? I hate people that always blame Microsoft when there is not many other people to blame. FYI *NIX reports HDD size in Base 2 as well.

 

[DaTT]

Originally posted by: Zepper
To the modem whiner: b=bits, B=bytes. So 33.6kb/sec is kilobits/sec - your download rate is stated in kB/sec or kiloBytes/sec so you would expect about 3.3kB/sec max thruput on tightly compressed files. . Each modem byte actually takes 10 bits: 8 data, 1 stop, 1 parity.

I just divide the bits by 8 to get a rough idea on bytes. For instance:

I have a 4Mb d/l on my cable MODEM, divided by 8 gives me roughly 500 KB/s. Its not exact, but its close enough until the bits start getting higher and higher. I have hit a steady d/l speed of 679KB/s on a 50MB file.

 

[WinkOsmosis]

Giga = billion. Has nothing to do with binary. HD makers are in the right.

 

[wetcat007]

Because of course everyone knows dell and gateway make harddrives

 

[wetcat007]

Originally posted by: KraziKid

Originally posted by: Blastman

Originally posted by: ElFenix the computer guys got it wrong. the REAL standard of gigabyte is 1 billion bytes. not 1073747824 bytes. in fact all the manufacturers even state what a REAL gigabyte is. the hard drive makers are right, the computer user AND the operating system are wrong. if this thing isn't tossed by the judge i'll be amazed.

Exactly. It?s Microsoft that need to update their operating system to reflect GB = 1,000,000,000. All international standards say a kilobyte is 1000 bytes ? not 1024. Kilo- is a Greek prefix meaning 1000 ? not 1024. Likewise a MB would be = 1,000,000 and so on. It seems to me that calling a kilobyte 1024 bytes is a leftover dinosaur from the past because memory was made in 256, 512, 1024 ? etc. chunks ? and 1024 was ? "about" ? a 1000, ? so we used an easier and rough estimation that was not precisely correct.. It's a redefinition that I think needs to be dropped. 1000=1000 whether your counting in binary, hex or whatever. So what if it doesn't make for nice even numbers in binary. If I say I have 6,400,000,000 bytes ? is that 6.4GB or 5.96GB or even 6,103.5MB???? The translation is clumsy if I use the "computer" conventions and wrong if I stick to the technically proper usage of GB. If I write it out as 6,400,000,000 bytes ?well it's 6,400,000,000 bytes. But if I abbreviate it, it's all of sudden it's 5.96GB? The common usage of the term seems to be changing as evidenced by disk drive manufactures.

So now Microsoft is to blame? I hate people that always blame Microsoft when there is not many other people to blame. FYI *NIX reports HDD size in Base 2 as well.

No, it's not microsoft's fault, MacOS or Linux or anything reads it out like that, it has to do with that a bit happens to be eight ones and zero's and it has to be measured in a number divsible by eight and some other mumbo jumbo that i learned in math a few years back. Sueing over this is complelty ridiculous, I mean cmon, this has been like this for as long as computers have been around. These are the same people that sue people for looking at them funny.