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Seagate CEO Bill Watkins has more than a few things to worry about: Seagate purchasers are entitled to free software or 5% cash back

With Cho v. Seagate Technology Holdings, Inc. wrapping up, Seagate customers who purchased a hard drive in OEM or retail packaging between the dates of March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007 are eligible to receive one of two different settlement benefits per hard drive purchased:
  • The “cash benefit” is available to customers who purchased a Seagate hard drive between March 22, 2001 and January 1, 2006, and entitles customers to receive 5% cash back on the amount they paid for the hard drive, before taxes. Claims for a cash benefit must be filed using the mail-in form, which is available on the settlement web site.
  • The “software benefit” is available to customers who purchased a Seagate hard drive between the dates of March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007, and entitles claimants to a free copy of the Seagate Software Suite, which retails for $40. Claims for a software benefit can be filled out online.

In both cases, customers must have purchased the hard drive as a discrete unit, as hard drives shipped with pre-built computers are not eligible under the proposed terms.

Cho v. Seagate was filed in April of 2005 by Sara Cho over claims that Seagate falsely advertised the capacity of their hard drives, overstating it by 7%. The nature of these claims lies in the difference between a gigabyte (1,000,000,000 bytes of 1 GB) and a giga binary byte (1,073,741,824 bytes or 1 GiB), as the abbreviation of “GB” is often used for both.

Seagate has denied and continued to deny both the false advertising claims and the fact that it has harmed anyone, and as of yet the courts have not ruled on the merits of the case.

Under the proposed terms of the settlement, Seagate will be required to:

  • Make “certain disclosures” about the nature of its hard drives’ storage capacity.
  • Reimburse affected customers with the benefits listed above.
  • Pay $1.8 million in attorney’s fees to the plaintiff’s counsel.

The final hearing date to approve the settlement will take place on February 7, 2008 at the San Francisco Superior Court.

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5% vs. 7%
By mdogs444 on 10/23/2007 8:25:42 PM , Rating: 1
Just as a honest question -

How is that they only have to give back 5% when they took you for 7%? Shouldnt they be required to give you back 7% if they overstated 7%?

I know pricing of hard drives are close, even when they are 20, 50, 100 gigs difference, but its seems that it would make more sense to give back 7%.

Just my opinion.




RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Adonlude on 10/23/2007 8:40:05 PM , Rating: 2
Depreciation in the cost per GB over the last few years perhaps?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/23/2007 8:42:36 PM , Rating: 3
They didn't "take you" for anything. "Giga" / "G" means 10^9 and their "80 GB" drives do have 80 x 10^9 bytes. The problem is that most software (wrongly) considers that "Giga" / "G" stands for 2^30 (which is an incorrect use of a standard SI magnitude prefix).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga

Seagate is probably doing this because they've concluded that it's cheaper than paying the lawyers, even if they win (which I'm pretty sure they would).

If they had claimed their drives had 80 GiB and it turned out they had 80 GB, then they would have been fooling people. As it is, they were the ones being accurate; it's the operating system that reports the wrong size (smaller than it should). An 80 GB drive from Seagate (or any other manufacturer) does have 80,000,000,000 bytes (actually, they usually have a little bit more than that).

If these people want to sue anyone, they should be suing Microsoft (& others) for reporting the drive size in GiB and calling it GB.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 8:58:13 PM , Rating: 5
Justin, you should be smart enough to realize that the computer industry repurposed SI prefixes many years ago and has used powers-of-two to measure memory for at least 35-40 years. Your statement that "software is wrong" is itself wrong since it adheres to the classic definitions instead of the newer "binary" units that were much more recently defined.

Furthermore, the "binary" units have not been fully embraced by the computer industry. For example, semiconductor memory is always measured in powers-of-two. That is because their manufactured size is powers-of-two, just as HDDs are.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/23/2007 9:35:37 PM , Rating: 2
The "newer binary units" (I take it you mean the IEC binary prefixes, not units, since the units are the actual bytes) are "Ki" / "Mi" / "Gi" / etc.. Not "k" / "M" / "G" / etc., which are standard SI magnitude prefixes, based on powers of ten.

Seagate is absolutely correct when stating that their 80,000,000,000 byte drive has 80 GB. Sorry but just because some lazy programmers decided that 1024 was "close enough" to 1000 to call it a "kilobyte", that does not change the meaning of the SI magnitude prefixes used in just about every area of science and engineering.

1 kg isn't 1024 grams, 1 MW is not 1048576 watts and 1 GHz is not 1073741824 hertz.

1 GB = 10^9 B = 1,000,000,000 B
1 GiB = 2^30 B = 1,073,741,824 B

...just as...

1 GHz = 10^9 Hz = 1,000,000,000 Hz
1 GiHz = 2^30 Hz = 1,073,741,824 Hz

Software in general (and operating systems in particular) should either start to report the real size of drives, or change the prefixes from SI decimal to IEC binary.

The "computer industry" did not (and cannot) "repurpose" standard SI prefixes. Network connection speeds, interface speeds and media bitrates, for example, are typically measured using the correct SI multiples. The same goes for hard drives. It's only RAM and software reporting of file sizes / disk space that uses binary multiples, and it's about time that was fixed.

If Windows starts reporting years as having 255 days, does that mean calendar makers should get sued?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 9:56:02 PM , Rating: 5
quote:
Sorry but just because some lazy programmers decided that 1024 was "close enough" to 1000 to call it a "kilobyte", that does not change the meaning of the SI magnitude prefixes used in just about every area of science and engineering.

No, not true - it was done this way from the beginning of computer science (in the 1950's or 1960's, maybe earlier) because memory was always manufactured in powers-of-two sizes. Therefore it became convenient to have, e.g., KB = 1024 bytes instead of 1000 bytes. I'm stating facts here, not opinions - open any CS/CE/EE textbook written and you'll see the same basic definition.
quote:
The "computer industry" did not (and cannot) "repurpose" standard SI prefixes. Network connection speeds, interface speeds and media bitrates, for example, are typically measured using the correct SI multiples. The same goes for hard drives. It's only RAM and software reporting of file sizes / disk space that uses binary multiples, and it's about time that was fixed.

Again, oh really, then where did the original definitions come from, before IEC? Also, you don't have a good explanation as to why RAM uses powers-of-two while other things like bitrates do not. The reason is that RAM, like HDDs, are manufactured in increments of powers-of-two, so it is most convenient to express their capacities that way. Bitrates, however, are based on powers-of-ten crystals, e.g., 100MHz crystal.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 1:46:50 AM , Rating: 2
Just because something is "convenient" (read, easier to implement) does not make it correct.

And it certainly does not mean that people who use the SI magnitude prefixes correctly (as they are used in every branch of science and engineering) are all of a sudden wrong.

The SI prefix "giga" / "G" stands for "multiplied by 10 raised to the power of nine", period. It doesn't have different meanings depending on what you are measuring, just as the number "ten" doesn't represent different amounts depending on what you are counting.

And you're (also) confusing bitrates (a digital concept) with bandwidth (an analog concept). The bandwidth used by digital interfaces is usually higher than its bitrate.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By mindless1 on 10/24/07, Rating: 0
RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/07, Rating: 0
RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 12:04:22 PM , Rating: 1
So what's your excuse...? :o)


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Proteusza on 10/24/2007 12:10:07 PM , Rating: 2
Does the SI define what a byte is? We know them to be 8 bits (hence the "by eight").

Because, if not, then why should the ISO define how to count bits of bytes?

For an example, the Imperial system has feet and inches, among other things. 12 inches = 1 foot. But foot is not an SI measurement, neither are inches.

I guess, what he is saying, is that because the ISO doesnt define inches (unless they do?) they cant define kilo-inches or mega-inches. They also cant define what a foot is.

I think thats what hes getting at. Myself, I wonder if there is a better body for standardizing computer measurements than the SI.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 1:54:19 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
Does the SI define what a byte is? We know them to be 8 bits (hence the "by eight").


The actual unit of data is the bit; the byte is just a "working" amount that depends on specific system architecture details. Various sizes (from 5 to 12 bits) are used by different devices. Which is why some languages (ex., French) use the word "octet" to describe 8-bit bytes (the size used by the vast majority of personal computers).

Since a bit is simply a binary digit (a two-state entity) and "eight" is a common number, there is no need to "define" either unit (unlike, say, a meter or a foot, which needs to be defined as a physical length).

quote:
why should the ISO define how to count bits of bytes?


They don't. But they do define what numeric notations mean. It doesn't matter what you are counting; "kilo-" always means x10³ (x10^3) and x10³ always means "times one thousand".

Of course, you are free to decide that 10³ actually means (to you) "three hundred and twelve", but don't expect to get a job in engineering.

It would perhaps be simpler to have a standard definition for "byte" (which enforced the 8-bit size), but that would go against the original spirit of the term (if it was meant to be exactly 8 bits long, people would have called it "octet" to begin with; the term "byte" was chosen precisely because its size could vary - like bite sizes vary with the size of the mouth). In systems with parity and other error recovery mechanisms, one byte of data often takes up more than 8 bits on the "physical" medium, but it's still called one byte.

When documenting interaction between different types of systems, where byte size compatibility can be an issue, the term "octet" is frequently used instead of "byte", to mean "8 bits", even in English (ex., RFC / IETF documents).

English and Imperial / American units (which aren't always identical, despite using the same names) were not defined by a single body, they are a collection of "traditional" units from different fields, which have been redefined several times throughout history.

They are older than the ISO and CIPM, so they definitely weren't determined by those bodies, but they are currently (as of 1985) based on SI units (for example, a yard is defined as "exactly 0.9144 meters", a foot is defined as "1/3rd of a yard" and the inch is defined as "1/36th of a yard"). So, in a way, the CIPM does define them. Here:

http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?activeTe...

None of that, however, alters the fact that the SI magnitude prefixes were already established by the time someone decided to coin the term "kilobyte". And I have no doubt that the person who did that knew perfectly well what "kilo" meant (as is clearly shown by the fact that he picked the power of two closest to the official meaning of "kilo-").

The problem was that the term was originally used merely as an approximation. 1024 bytes is "1 kilobyte" if you round it to the nearest kilobyte, just as 16386 bytes is "16 kilobytes" if you round it to the nearest kilobyte. People in the industry knew it was just an approximation. It was never meant to be extrapolatd to gigabytes and terabytes.

Normal users today do not understand (nor should they be required to understand) why that approximation was used, instead of using the terms "kilo", "mega", etc., as they are used in every other context ("kilowatt", "megahertz", etc., always meaning exact powers of ten).

When someone says that the diameter of the Earth is 8 thousand miles, that doesn't mean a mile is now defined as 1/8000th of the Earth's diameter. It just means that person decided to round the Earth's diameter to the nearest thousand miles, for practical reasons. In fact, a mile is defined as 1760 yards, and one yard is defined as 0.9144 meters (in other words, 1 mile is exactly 1609.344 meters).

quote:
I wonder if there is a better body for standardizing computer measurements than the SI.


What do you mean by "computer measurements"? Unless you are dealing with physical entities (space, time, forces, etc.), numbers are just numbers. You don't need to define the meaning of "1000" for "computers" any more than you need to define the meaning of "1000" for bananas. Information is an abstract concept; it's based on pure maths. The SI (and the CIPM, which defines the SI) has nothing to do with it.

If you mean computing terms in general (not measurements), then, again, those have nothing to do with the SI; they are defined by several different organizations, like the IEEE, ISO and IEC. But all those organizations use the SI magnitude prefixes when writing numbers, and they all agree that calling 1024 bytes "one kilobyte" is wrong . The "binary" prefixes ("Ki", "Mi", etc.) were created by the IEC - they are not part of the SI - to give people an easier alternative.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 2:12:51 PM , Rating: 1
You seem pretty smart, but maybe a little clueless about comp sci terminology. The meaning of a "byte" being exactly 8 bits is nearly universal. For processors that address a different number of bits at a time, that unit is typically called a "word," not a "byte."

Also, I've only rarely heard of "octet" used in English to mean the same thing as "byte" = 8 bits. That use is very uncommon in English - I've only seen it used in some of the older Internet protocol definitions.

I didn't get through the rest of your post - too long for me, sorry.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By MrPoletski on 10/24/2007 2:33:25 PM , Rating: 2
I'm waiting for the base-9/octal number system for defining hard disk capacity lol


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 8:31:50 PM , Rating: 2
Waiting? You're about 30 years too late. Been there, done that, unlikely to go back. It's bad enough having to deal with big-endian vs. little-endian bytes, completely different sizes for "ints" (sometimes on the same system) and so on.

If you ask me, we should just measure things in bits (which is exactly what people do with modern media formats).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By murphyslabrat on 10/24/2007 3:44:45 PM , Rating: 2
"Older protocol definitions" or not, my Intro to Networking instructor calls the bytes of an IP address "Octets".

While uncommon, it is still a valid name.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 4:37:48 PM , Rating: 1
It's not just valid; it's essential when you're dealing with devices that handle information in "chunks" of 9, 10 or 12 bits, for example. And those protocols are very much in use today (as I'm sure you know but TomZ above apparently doesn't).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 4:51:21 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
And those protocols are very much in use today (as I'm sure you know but TomZ above apparently doesn't).

Wow, you really do have a short memory, don't you? Here's what I said just a couple of posts up:

I've only seen it used in some of the older Internet protocol definitions

And, duh, those are probably the protocols the OP is studying in his/her class, right? E.g., TCP/IP, etc.?

Where else do you the term "octet" used in industry?

Actually, I'm surprised you aren't all upset that Unix uses the term "octet" in a different way, meaning a set of 3 bits for security permissions. After all, you obviously can't seem to comprehend the idea that a given term could have different meanings in different contexts.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 8:21:26 PM , Rating: 2
Actually, I read what you wrote (not that there's much point, except for either a bit of a chuckle or amazement at how some people are able to post and post and post about things they don't understand).

There's nothing "older" about those protocols. IPv6, for example, is so new it's not even implemented by most of the internet yet:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2460.html

The word "octet" appears more than 90 times just in that document. And you can find it in pretty much any internet protocol description (IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, etc.), as well as technical literature for networking hardware, and so on.

The term "octet" has nothing to do with "the industry". It's a numeric term which simply means "group of eight", just as a "quartet" is a group of four. PC system architecture is based on bit octets (groups of eight bits). Since other devices handle data in bytes of 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11 or 12 bits, whenever different systems need to interoperate, 8-bit bytes are specifically described as "(bit) octets" or "8-bit characters".

Using the word "octet" to describe UNIX permission masks is actually incorrect (not that that stops some people), since there is no "set of eight"; there is a set of four values (ie, a quartet), each of which can take one of eight possible values (which is, itself, a bit mask for three flags). For that reason, the correct term is octal (meaning "with eight possibilities"), not octet (which would mean "a group of eight things").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_permissio...

So if you call UNIX permission masks "octets", congratulations, you're wrong again.

In fact, in UNIX (as anywhere else in the IT world), the term "octet" by itself usually refers to bit octets, also known as 8-bit characters, or 8-bit bytes. For example:

http://www.mail-archive.com/unicode@unicode.org/ms...

quote:
Unix filenames consist of an arbitrary sequence of octets, excluding 0x00 and 0x2F.


Or, of course, the definition of UUEncode (UNIX-to-UNIX encode):

http://www.opengroup.org/pubs/online/7908799/xcu/u...

quote:
The algorithm that is used for lines in between begin and end takes three octets as input and writes four characters of output by splitting the input at six-bit intervals into four octets, containing data in the lower six bits only. These octets are converted to characters by adding a value of 0x20 to each octet, so that each octet is in the range 0x20-0x5f [...]


Again, if you want to pretend that you're familiar with these things, try taking a 10-minute break from your posting marathon and do some basic research. With access to Google, even you can look like an expert (ok, maybe not an expert, but at least vaguely informed).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/07, Rating: -1
RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 10:41:24 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
You are far and away the most arrogant and overconfident person I've ever seen posting on DT.


It probably just seems that way to you because I call you on your bullshit, and (unfortunately for you) I actually know what I'm talking about; I don't just look up Wikipedia articles (or edit them) to pretend I understand things.

As I posted above, the fact that an octet is a "group of eight" does not prevent some (ignorant) people from mixing the term up with "octal". But if you bother to read the full Wikipedia article about file system permissions (which is linked to from the very article you quoted), or if you actually spend 7 years working with UNIX systems (as I have), you will learn that the correct term to describe the numbers used in file system permissions is "octal", not "octet".

Regarding the "dozens of posters correcting me", you must mean your imaginary friends; in this sub-thread, the only other person posting is murphyslabrat, who confirmed what I had explained to you (as will anyone else familiar with basic digital communication protocols).

As to "continuing to post over and over", you must be talking about someone closer to home. In fact, your claims that you are "a software developer" seem pretty unlikely considering the fact that you post around 10 messages a day, just in this forum.

Assuming you need to sleep and eat, that's about one message per hour. Add the time necessary to read the messages you're replying to (though I suspect you don't bother with that, otherwise you would have learned something by now) and the time necessary to research and confirm your answers (yeah, right), and I don't see how you could possibly manage to hold on to a job.

Unless by "software developer" you mean writing bits of Javascript in your parents' basement, of course.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By croc on 10/26/2007 6:15:31 AM , Rating: 2
Octal generally refers to an 8 bit CPU, such as the Z80. Octet most generally refers to a segment of memory comprised of 8 bits, but is also sometimes used to refer to 'words' in a complex CPU instruction set. i.e, an 8 bit pre-fetch in a 16 bit memory schema would generally be referred to as 'the first octet'.

However, in the case of the above 8 bit CPU, they are interchangeable.

I have never heard either term used in any unix system that I have used to relate to file, ownership, or group permissions.

To quote from one of my favorite websites, ZZEE.com,

2.2. Numeric (octal) representation like "644"
If a numeric representation is used (like in chmod command, for example), then it is in the octal format (with the base of 8), and digits involved are 0 to 7. Octal format is used for the simplicity of understanding: every octal digit combines read, write and execute permissions together. Respective access rights for owner, group and others (in this order) are the last three digits of the numeric file permissions representation. Example: "0644". Here the second digit ("6" in the example) stands for rights of the owner, the third digit ("4" in the example) stands for rights of the group, the fourth digit ("4" in the example) stands for rights of others.

This table shows what numeric values mean:

Octal digit Text equivalent Binary value Meaning
0 --- 000 All types of access are denied
1 --x 001 Execute access is allowed only
2 -w- 010 Write access is allowed only
3 -wx 011 Write and execute access are allowed
4 r-- 100 Read access is allowed only
5 r-x 101 Read and execute access are allowed
6 rw- 110 Read and write access are allowed
7 rwx 111 Everything is allowed

We see that "1" stands for execute only, "2" stands for write only, "4" stands for read only. To combine the permissions you can simply add 1, 2 and 4 to get a needed combination. For instance, to get read and write permissions, you add 4 (read) and 2 (write), thus getting 6 (read and write). To get read and execute permissions, you add 4 (read) and 1 (execute), thus getting 5 (read and execute).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By winterspan on 10/25/2007 2:12:19 AM , Rating: 2
That has to be the most outrageous claim I have seen on this website. I have been reading DailyTech regularly for a few years now, and each time I scroll down to the comment section I cringe at the thought that this "TomZ" character has once again soiled a perfectly good discussion with his arrogant, abrasive, and woefully misinformed comments.

As for the use of "octet" as a more precise definition of an 8 bit byte, it is widely used in hardware engineering.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Alexstarfire on 10/24/2007 2:58:48 PM , Rating: 3
I didn't really feel like reading all of your quite dumb posts to be honest. Sure, Kilo in SI is 1,000, but everything in the computer has been done in the power-of-two notation since computers began. Sure, they probably shouldn't have used SI to begin with, but they did.

The reason why people are mad over it is because if everything else uses the power-of-two notation then HDD manufacturers should as well. They know good and well how the OS will report it.

Would it make you feel better if they just changed the damn notation a bit?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 4:28:46 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
I didn't really feel like reading all of your quite dumb posts


Looks like you should have, maybe you could have avoided publicly displaying your ignornace on the subject.

quote:
The reason why people are mad over it is because if everything else uses the power-of-two notation then HDD manufacturers should as well. They know good and well how the OS will report it.


So you think your "4.7 GB" DVDs hold 5046586573 bytes of data? You think your "3 GHz" CPU runs at 3221225472 cycles per second? You think that your 3 Gb/s SATA interface can transfer 3221225472 bits per second?

Guess what, most fields of IT (and electronics, which includes computer hardware) use the correct x1000 factor. It's only (some) software reporting of RAM and file sizes that uses the incorrect x1024 factor for "kilo" (and progressively wronger factors for mega, giga, etc.).

In fact, all relevant standards organizations specifically discourage or forbid the use of the term "kilo" / "k" to mean "multiplied by 1024". The IEC offers an easy "fix": just use "Ki" (and "Mi", "Gi", etc.) instead, and you don't even need to fix the maths.

If anyone is in violation of the industry standards here it's the software which still uses the term "GB" to mean "1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes", instead of "one billion bytes". They can either learn to count correctly (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) or report the size in GiB (1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes).

Seagate is absolutely correct, both in terms of accordance with the rest of the industry and in terms of compliance with the national and international standards organizations.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By MrSmurf on 10/28/2007 5:10:05 PM , Rating: 2
Justin and Tom, you both have too much time on your hands.

Move on.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By geddarkstorm on 10/24/2007 12:42:38 PM , Rating: 2
Oh really? Feet is a unit, as are meters, but meters belongs to the SI and feet belongs to the King's system. Units exist in different systems, as well as magnitude prefixes. If you are not using an SI unit, you cannot correctly use an SI prefix. In the same vein, if you use a unit of another system, you can use a prefix that also happens to be in the SI and have it equal something else. Your issue is with language.

Moreover, since when was the SI the all knowing rulers of the universe? I'm sorry to say, but in the computer industry, where Seagate resides, KiloByte and GigaByte refers to powers of 2 ALWAYS. The computer industry does not run on the SI system; the prefixes are not SI prefixes even if they sound the same.

BTW, I'm a biologist and researcher. We use the SI system all the time because it's convenient, but there are many other systems out there. The SI system is not the penultimate, nor do they define everything. As long as you have consistency, there isn't an issue. The computer industry has always been consistent with its usages, Seagate broke that consistency and therefore falsely advertised sizes. You probably don't know why the lawsuit against McDonald's and the temperature of their coffee succeeded, do you? It's because McDonald's heated their coffee above the industry standard; which when you are out industry standard of you are fair game.

Now, Seagate can claim that it's the HDD industry standard to use SI prefixes instead of IT (information technology) prefixes (even if the prefixes use the same word, they are different values! Don't be so easily fooled by appearances or think you know more than you do), and maybe they are right. But, it's also possible the courts will rule that the industry standard is the IT definition for Giga and Kilo, and then Seagate is screwed.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:19:18 PM , Rating: 3
There is no such thing as "the King's system" (what king would that be, anyway?). Furthermore:

1. Imperial units are currently based on SI units (ex., one yard is defined as "exactly 0.9144 meters"). As are virtually all other physical units in use today.

2. Magnitude prefixes are merely standard number notations; they can be applied to any number describing a quantity.

3. There is no such thing as "IT prefixes". Nowhere is "kilo-" defined as meaning "multiplied by 1024". In fact, most fields in IT (communications, storage, signaling, etc.) use the prefixes correctly. A lot of modern software also uses the correct terminology (ex., describing 3128 bytes as "3 KiB", and not "3 KB").

4. Computing and engineering terms are defined mainly by the IEC and IEEE. Both of which use the standard SI prefixes, and both of which agree that "one kilobyte" means "1000 bytes". There is absolutely no organization recommending the use of "kilo-" to mean "multiplied by 1024".

5. Seagate did not "break the consistency". Hard drive sizes have always been correctly reported (80,000,000,000 bytes = 80 GB), by all manufacturers.

It's amazing how some people feel the need to post highly inflamed speeches about how others are doing things "right" or "wrong" when they don't have a clue about history or about the underlying standards and terminology. Maybe you, as a biology researcher, could try to explain that phenomenon...


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By geddarkstorm on 10/24/2007 3:00:20 PM , Rating: 2
Oh man, there are many problems with what you said.

1. Calling "Imperial" as "King" is an expression since the kings/queens of england set the rules and changed or reaffirmed the measurement system at their leisure http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9016522/Briti... . Moreover, this system came FIRST, long before metric; metric was later and a totally different system. Converting between yards and meters does not mean they belong to the same system, just as pounds and liters are of the totally two different systems. Because MATH is universal, you can translate between them all.

2. They can, but they can also be defined however it is wished. Romans used a base 12 system, to them Kilo would be whatever times 12 to the whatever. In computer science, base two system was originally used for whatever reasons (most likely based on bits either being 1 or 0, so one of 2 choices).

3. There isn't, I used that term for the purpose of distinction, and in computer science that is how it's defined, now isn't it? At least that was how it was originally defined.

4. Interesting, as even though you claim that, the convention that it does mean 1024 has been commonly used for decades. Certainly both conventions have been used at once, but in different areas.

5. You think that, as do I. I never said they did, BUT, I don't know what the industry standard is defined as, and it may well be that the courts will rule that it is expected that giga and kilo mean the common definition we see for file sizes and what is typically taught in schools. The courts will decide, as I stated, as they did with McDonald's (even though McDonald's had a nice disclaimer saying how hot their coffee was, they still got burned (heh)). Then they'll basically say if you are right and wrong, till then it's your opinion nothing else.

You love to spread disinformation. The fact kilo is used to mean 1024 bytes in most applications is irrefutable, it is historically so and has been in the sciences as well as in software and the school system. If that is changing, then it is changing. SI didn't always exist, and it brought huge changes with it in the hopes of uniting the different fields of science who were using different measures. That could be happening here, and maybe even the whole kilo is 1024 is an error that happened long ago and propagated: But it still exists, and it is still in the common mindset, so trying to say it's so horrible wrong is in itself wrong. It is what it is and it could change or it could not, we will see! In any case, when it comes to the "bit" and "byte" unit, as far as I've ever seen without exception with the current days software, any kilo or so prefix is fit to the 1024 times system; if new stuff is changing that then it is, but it's still historical.

I also am amazed at how utterly fervent you are about this issue as if someone's holding a gun to your head. Oh my, it's not being used in the proper SI context! The world will EXPLODE! Gees, relax for once.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Alexstarfire on 10/24/2007 3:03:38 PM , Rating: 2
Do you enjoy being a jackass or are you truly just trying to piss people off. The Imperial units of measure were NEVER based off of SI. I don't even see how that is possible since SI came after Imperial. Couldn't tell you what king it was, if it even was a king, but it is said to have originated in England from one of its rulers.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 4:00:54 PM , Rating: 2
Do you enjoy displaying your ignorance in public forums, or are you just too lazy to do some basic research?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customa...

quote:

U.S. customary units, also known in the United States as English units [...] are defined in terms of SI base units [...] most countries, including the United States, redefined their customary units in terms of SI units like kilogram and meter.


http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?activeTe...

quote:

The yard or the metre shall be the unit of measurement of length and the pound or the kilogram shall be the unit of measurement of mass by reference to which any measurement involving a measurement of length or mass shall be made [...] the yard shall be 0.9144 metre exactly [...] the pound shall be 0.45359237 kilogram exactly.


Seriously, is this forum full of 12 year olds, or do people just sleep through highschool nowadays? You never had a physics or maths class about units of measurement...?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By BVT on 10/24/07, Rating: 0
RE: 5% vs. 7%
By highlandsun on 10/26/2007 8:05:51 AM , Rating: 2
quote:

5. Seagate did not "break the consistency". Hard drive sizes have always been correctly reported (80,000,000,000 bytes = 80 GB), by all manufacturers.


If you believe this then you are clearly too young to know what you're talking about. The first hard drive I remember holding was a 5MB Shugart. This is important to note, because these facts *are* true:
1. hard drive sectors have always been 512 bytes

2. disk drives have always been rated in whole number capacities, with a whole number of sectors

3. 5,000,000 / 512 is not a whole number ( = 9765.625, fyi.)

The fact is that historically, hard drives were rated in units of 1024-byte kilobytes, just like other computer memory-related hardware. It was a natural outcome of the hardware layout: There was always an even number of tracks and an even number of sectors per track. And of course the controllers used to manage the drives obviously were based on powers of two, like all other computer hardware.

LBA (Logical Block Addressing) for hard drives was a relatively recent convention. Before that, all computers used disk geometry (heads/tracks/sectors) to operate hard drives. And these parameters were always constrained to 4 bytes (0-255 heads, 0-65535 tracks, 0-255 sectors) and pretty much always used even numbers in each field, which pretty much guaranteed that a drive capacity was an even multiple of 4096 bytes. (Which is also one reason that 4K has been the most common filesystem page size for over 3 decades, because it would always use every sector on a disk with nothing left over wasted.)

It was only when disk capacities finally exceeded the range that's expressible in C/H/S notation, and LBA took over, that the close correspondence of disk capacities with 4K blocks disappeared. Because once you hit 1GB, pretty much any capacity above that divides evenly by 512 anyway, whether it's K-aligned or not.

I wonder how many milliyears you've been around computers, or if you've even been within a kilomile of an original Winchester disk.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/29/2007 6:23:36 PM , Rating: 2
I've been around computers since before hard drives were invented, so you do the maths (the first hard drive I ever used was 10 MB, though), and I wouldn't even consider the days of manual CHS configuration as "old history".

This is not, however, about sector sizes (which are typically not even measured in kB, let alone GB), it's about the size of drives.

80 GB (for example) is not a power of two (and neither is 80 GiB), so the whole argument about using powers of two is void. Seagate uses the term correctly, so do all other manufacturers, and so do all the relevant standards organisations.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/30/2007 3:40:28 AM , Rating: 2
The sector size used by the drive's internal OS is a power of 2. There is no particular reason it needs to be, it has nothing to do with the physical characteristics of a drive. The manufacturer is quite free to adopt metric sectors of either 500 or 1000 bytes. However their software engineers would probably be seriously upset over having to write algorithms to handle base 10 math using base 2 units. Having written subroutines to convert binary digits, octal digits, decimal digits and hex digits for a simple assembler I can say that by sharing a multiply by 2 subroutine binary, octal and hex required 9 bytes of code each. Decimal require 22 bytes of code since it cannot be handled as a binary value.

The total number of sectors on the disk is set by technical considerations. First it is decided how many tracks the disk will have. Second it is decided how many sectors can be fitted on each track. You can get more by assigning more sectors to the outer tracks, you get simpler addressing if you assign a fixed number of sectors to each track. The final decision is how many total heads will be used. 1 platter is usually 2 heads. Multiple platters can be single sided, but are often double sided. The top and bottom surfaces of multiple platter drives may be left unused.

When all those design criteria are settled you next determine the capacity of the drive by adding up the number of sectors on "in use" tracks. I phrase it that way since some of the tracks will be assigned as backup that will be invisibly allocated when an "in use" sector is unusable. Under the CHS addressing the sector was simply marked bad and attempts to access it returned an error. Under LBA a backup sector is read/written when a bad sector is accessed.

The number of KB of storage is 1/2 the total sectors free. For a drive of around 80MiByte capacity this will be 80*1024*2 sectors. There is no reason whatsoever that the drive manufacturer cannot use the industry standard definition and offer an 80GB disk drive that has 80GB free. When the file system is setup there may be some file management usage that allocates some sectors to OS use, but the total storage including this OS usage should be 80GB as reported by the file manager on a drive that is advertised as having 80GB formatted capacity.

Another anomaly was that drive size limit set by the CHS addressing. The reason for the limits on the values that could be used was that the drives & the controllers did not agree on the data fields in the CHS value. This meant that the only legal values were the ones that did not use the bits that were disagreed on. This could have been fixed by either the controller manufacturers using the CHS bit field assignments used by the drive manufacturers or by the drive manufacturers using the bit field definitions used by the controllers. This change was never made. The size limits were "fixed" by software that could access sectors with illegal CHS values.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By mindless1 on 10/24/2007 2:27:16 PM , Rating: 2
Byte is part of the computer industry's binary system. Using a decimal prefix to a binary unit is an invalid expression within this system if you attempt to apply it without the rules of that system, you've missed the whole point.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By mathew7 on 10/24/2007 2:47:02 AM , Rating: 2
First of all, HDD's have nothing with powers of two. They are completely analog storage. They even have the sector storage much bigger than the 512 bytes we see (ECC & stuff). HDD vs RAM is like CRT vs LCD. Like you use sync periods in CRTs, the HDDs use ECC and positioning algorithms, in contrast with RAM/LCD which use a direct row/column mapping.

Second, what's the next step? Law-suit to DVD-RAM group? You do know that DVD is advertised as 4.7GB, while it actually has 4.4 GiB? Of course, 7% of 4.7GB is MUCH less than 80GB. Also, when you write in the ISO format, you don't have such a big FS overhead.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By mindless1 on 10/24/2007 4:49:41 AM , Rating: 2
Quite wrong, they are not analog storage. Do you know what digital storage is? It is quite valid to use a varying threshold hi/low value to determine a binary digit.

HDD vs RAM is not like CRT vs LCD. An old audio tape is analog but a hard drive stores DIGITS.

That by definition, is digital. I suppose you'd say a CD is analog too? You'd have to using your logic since just as both mediums have binary digits written, they are read back against a threshold value which is not a hard 0 or 1.

Next step? I say give HDD manufacturers one last chance to start advertising capacity valid for the environment in which the device is used. If they don't, fine them $1000 a drive. If we can make examples of individual citizens then why not a hard drive company?

NOthing against Seagate, they just happened to be the brand du jour, and have an equal opportunity to restate capacity based on the product use, which is the most appropriate context possible.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Veraiste on 10/29/2007 5:12:27 PM , Rating: 2
Why not force the software makers to go in line with *everyone* else? No one else uses that horrible approximation. It is solely used by a portion of the software industry in reference to disk space.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Proteusza on 10/24/2007 5:01:59 AM , Rating: 2
mindless1 is entirely correct. Just because something is stored with voltage levels, does not mean it is binary.

Hard drives are binary, each position on the platter is a 0 or 1.

Computers have been measuring everything in powers of 2 since they were made, because of the binary system. There was a time when MB stood for 1024 KB, and GB stood for 1024 MB. the SI defines that as incorrect, fair enough, but, for the early days of the computer industry, thats exactly what they meant. Many people are still confused between GB and GiB, and I dont think that either the SI or hard drive manufacturers have done enough to make people aware of the difference.

Just a question, how does the SI force others to adopt its meanings for prefixes? Are there laws in every country forcing SI compliance? Just wondering.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Oregonian2 on 10/24/2007 2:27:10 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Hard drives are binary, each position on the platter is a 0 or 1.


Yes, and the bytes in a 80,000,000 "80GB" hard drive are binary bytes.

It's just the "80G" part that's not binary as such, and never has been for hard drives as long as I remember (been a designer of microprocessor based systems since 1973).

Drives aren't inherently built in binary multiples. The number of tracks on a platter is how many that fit, not something an even binary multiple. The number of bytes on a track is how many that fit, not some even binary multiple. Even the number of heads (platter surfaces) isn't a binary multiple sometimes. The 750GB WD drive I just bought on sale at Fry's has 5 platters, meaning 10 heads. "10" isn't exactly an even binary multiple. They've 3-platter ones too. They once had two platter ones with only three data heads (fourth was used for timing of something, I don't recall). They then just map things from there.

They paying for doing what everybody has done "forever" is IMO silly and stupid. In any case I've been having failures in Seagate China-built drives lately, so my former enthusiasm for them has subsided (and going back to WD).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 2:42:12 PM , Rating: 1
I'll admit HDDs could go either way, IMO. Although you're right about tracks/sectors/heads being based on physical geometry, the sector size is typically 512 bytes (never like 500). Therefore, once you multiply things out, you will get a nice even number in "KB = 1024" measure. Allocation of space in the file system data structures is also powers-of-two, since it fundamentally synchronizes with the sector size.

But I can understand that converting the total using the more marketing-friendly base-10 method is not completely invalid. The problem with this approach is that it contradicts the typical use when referring to memory and files in use by nearly all software.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Oregonian2 on 10/24/2007 5:36:45 PM , Rating: 2
First of all, yes the disk is probably a multiple of 512, but that doesn't matter much, it could be 11,111 of those. Not a power of two of the for the reasons you and I mention.

Memory is by power of two because of the addressing scheme in hardware IC's where another pin is added (or through multiplexing). An address is a power-of-two binary progression because of that (even though there HAVE been "3K memory chips" made in the past (by AMD I recall) and although the "K" is 1024, the total amount isn't a power-of-two amount). Chips practically speaking need to be power-of-two for reasons of easily (with little to no logic) making blocks of memory larger than one chip.

Software gets power-of-two binary memory because it uses memory that's that way in terms of "supply", but in truth it's not really binary sized either. You can (and do) malloc(sizeof struct foobar) sorts of things all the time and that struct is some random size, not power of two. Also if you look at a .EXE file, it's very likely NOT a power-of-two in size. Software uses memory in random sizes. Could be 17 bytes. Software is RARELY accessing power-of-two memory-wise (unless you want to count reading word-widths, which IMO is a silly argument). The only thing power-of-two is the total memory that's installed, and that's back to the hardware chips of memory. Go and look at the filesize of files on your PC. They're random in filelength (in windows do a "properties" of a file then look at the byte count, it'll be "random". The size listed in a explorer directory listing is either rounded up or is the file allocation size (quantized to the file system's block size). Properties should give the actual size of the file in bytes. They're probably not a power-of-two size, and probably not even a multiple of 1024.

One could, I think, make a stronger case that memory is wrong and should use power-of-ten sorts of numbers.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/26/2007 10:28:43 AM , Rating: 2
Been done already. Some of the early computer systems used base 10 digits instead of base 2 digits. That is a "bit" on those systems could have any of 10 different values. Just for fun try building a logic table for base 10 Boolean. Instead of not True==False, you now have absolute False, absolute True & 8 levels of partially true in between. Fuzzy logic anyone :P

The final decision to use Base 2 for computers was a hardware decision. The circuits were easier to design and build. Computers that do not use powers of 2 were quite common in the early days. The systems that were easiest to design stayed on. So the 12bit/18bit addressing went out of fashion and the 8bit DATA stuck. You will find 5,6,7,9,10,11,12 etc. bit lengths in data groups when examining the actual communications stream. Parity memory in your computer is 9 bit. 8 bits storage & 1 bit for error correction. You see 8 bits, the computer uses 9. Data transmission when sending 8bits of data often adds a "stop bit", "parity bit" and other comm protocol bits that are filtered out by the receiver. The Baudot standard uses 5 data bits plus the protocol overhead.

HDD sectors are sized in powers of 2 to allow for binary addressing of the DATA. The HDD drive has it's own internal protocols that are invisible to the user. These protocols also write data between the sectors and in some cases between the bytes in the sector. This overhead reduces the capacity of the hard disk from the user's point of view. This is why Commodore was able to format a 1.4MB floppy to store approx 1.6MB of data. The difference represents wasted space & system overhead on the IBM format. Microsoft also used a lower overhead storage that they tried to keep proprietary. There was a lot of frustration when people tried to copy those CAB files. They just wouldn't fit on the same size disk they were copied from :P


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/30/2007 4:11:41 AM , Rating: 2
The number of bytes in a file is arbitrary. The allocated storage is File System defined. Using Microsoft file systems or any of the file systems used by Linux/Unix systems the ALLOCATED storage will always be a multiple of the disk sector size. Exceptions to this rule are files stored in container files (Zip, CAB, etc.) The allocated storage assigned to the container is a multiple of the disk sector size.

The total number of unused sectors marked as allocated is determined by the number of sectors assigned to a file system logical block. For example if the allocation unit of the File System is 4KB then the wasted storage will be 2KB*(the total number of files) The reason is that all allocations for 1 byte up to 4KB will use 4KB storage in this example. Floppy disks use 12 or 16 bit values to address File System blocks. Hard drives use 32 or 64 bit block numbers. The larger the number of bits available for a block address the smaller the File System block can be. The file system block is almost always sector_size*2^n bytes. No technical reason other than making a programmer's life easier.

Memory is measured in powers of 2. However there is no requirement that all addresses be populated with physical memory. The Commodore VIC 20 used 9K total RAM. 8K was accessed by one block of addresses, 508 bytes were also mapped into the video chip address space. Yes that is not a power of 2, it is instead the number of displayable characters. An additional 1K block of 4 bit memory was mapped to the video chip. All of these complications were design decisions.

The Commodore 64 memory map was a nightmare since you could address around 192K of address space using 16bit addressing. This was done by using multiple banks of memory space. You selected the bank & the address. The number of memory banks did not have to be a power of 2, but on the B series it was a power of two. That series also had a 64K address space, with a total of 1024K addressable. By designing hardware that does what the designer intends you can do many things to make life difficult for programmers, including, but not limited to, decimal memory addressing.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 8:11:12 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
First of all, HDD's have nothing with powers of two. They are completely analog storage. They even have the sector storage much bigger than the 512 bytes we see (ECC & stuff).

As you said, the storage capacity is 512 bytes = 2^9 bytes. Therefore if you multiply by total number of sectors, you get some number that is pretty conveniently expressed in powers-of two.

But the marketing people are right - HDD capacities are better expressed in powers-of-ten since that gives a perceived capacity 7% more without adding cost.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By geddarkstorm on 10/24/2007 12:45:27 PM , Rating: 2
HDDs are digital. Either you have your magnetic alignment pointing north or south (which equals a 1 or 0, though I don't know which one is which, and different manufacturers could easily do it either way, it doesn't matter). Analogue is sine wave or anything like that, which means an infinite spectrum--that is not the case.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 10:07:06 PM , Rating: 3
Justin, I also think you should read this Wiki article, since I think they got it right:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

However, as 210 = 1024 ˜ 1000, the established K (for kilo) was early on employed as a convenient "approximate" prefix for memory capacities in multiples of 1024.

the word "kibibyte" is seldom seen in practice ... according to Google test, its usage is less than 0.3%

The overwhelming popularity of the 1024 definition for memory and file sizes means that anyone using "kilobyte" to mean 1000 in these situations is likely to cause confusion. However, it is common to use 1000 when deriving kilobyte measures from quantities which are not based on powers of two, such as bitrates.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/23/07, Rating: -1
RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:28:30 AM , Rating: 4
"Look, if you guys are going to up-rate TomZ's posts and down-rate mine, you might as well go ahead and..."

...tell the ISO and the CIPM, and everyone working in physics, mathematics and engineering that they've been using incorrect terminology for the past 50 years.

The alternative, as I explained above, is that in one particular field (or rather, sub-field), some people found it easier to just pretend that 1024 = 1000, because it saved them some work and made numbers look rounder.

That does not mean that people who can actually count have suddenly become wrong. Seagate (and all other hard drive manufacturers) have always used SI prefixes correctly. So have manufacturers of several other kinds of electronic devices.

Just because your operating system thinks that a drive with 80,000,000,000 bytes has "74.5 GB", that does not mean Seagate (or anyone else) is trying to deceive you. It just means your operating system is a bit confused about what "giga" means (as a consequence of some people starting to use the SI prefixes incorrectly 30 years ago, because it was "convenient" for them).

Much simpler than using the IEC prefixes is to simply do the maths correctly. When displaying the size of a partition (or a file), the OS should simply use the correct magnitude values. If the drive has 60,000,000,000 bytes, then display it as having 60 GB, which is 100% correct, and will make users feel much better than if they saw "55.9 GB" (which normal users assume means 55,900,000,000 bytes).

There is absolutely no reason why this nonsense of "1024 = 1000" should subsist today. Computers should present numbers in a form that's consistent and in accordance to the standards used by normal human beings , not computer programmers from 1980. If you're going to argue that the 1024 factor makes sense due to some irrelevant technical detail that lies several layers below the interface presented to users, you might as well argue that all numbers should be displayed in hexadecimal format, or perhaps binary. After all, that's how they're manipulated internally, right?

And then some people wonder why so many users complain that developers don't have a clue about the real world... sigh...


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 8:14:17 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
...tell the ISO and the CIPM, and everyone working in physics, mathematics and engineering that they've been using incorrect terminology for the past 50 years.

I'm not saying anything negative about ISO, IEC, etc. I'm just saying that the newer IEC definitions don't have much traction in the industry.

And to say one is right and one is wrong is like saying that Metric units are wrong and Imperial units are right. They are both equally valid.

quote:
And then some people wonder why so many users complain that developers don't have a clue about the real world...

That's an ironic statement coming from you, who are completely ignoring real-world usage for half a century, instead favoring an obscure IEC publication that practically nobody uses.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 12:17:16 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
And to say one is right and one is wrong is like saying that Metric units are wrong and Imperial units are right.


Using this type of argument shows that you are either deliberately dishonest (perhaps to try to save face after your blunders like mixing up GB and GiB, and claiming that "the judge said Seagate broke the law" when the article clearly states that no court has made a decision about this case), or you are completely clueless.

Metric and Imperial units have different names (and, in any case, those are units , not magnitude prefixes).

This is about a small sub-section of the IT industry using pre-existing SI prefixes ( which already had their meaning well established in every field of science, maths and engineering, as well as other fields of IT and electronics) as an approximation. 1024 bytes can be considered as "one kilobyte" in the same way that 1024 metres will usually be described, in everyday speech, as "one kilometer".

Since it wasn't practical to manufacture or address memory in chunks of exactly 1000 bytes, chunks of 1024 bytes were used instead. And since it wasn't practical to say "one point zero two four kilobytes", people just called it "one kilobyte", which is close enough and gets the point across. Anyone working in the field knew it wasn't actually one kilobyte. It was one kilobyte plus 2.4%.

Now computers are used by a lot of normal people, who have no idea where the "1024 ? 1000" approximation comes from, but who (for the most part) do have some basic education in maths and physics. So they know the SI prefixes (from "gigahertz", "kilowatt", etc.), and they know their real meaning (x10^9, x10^3, etc.). On top of that, we are now dealing with giga and terabytes, not kilobytes anymore, so the error is no longer just 2.4%, it's closer to 10% in some cases (because it adds up with each magnitude level).

So it's up to the (few) areas of IT where the 1024 approximation still subsists to fix things. The best way to fix it would simply be to calculate the values using exact numbers, instead of approximations. That means that a 4,000,000 byte file should be listed as having exactly 4 MB, and so on. That is what is done for interface speeds, bitrates, hard drive sizes, and so on.

The IEC "binary" magnitude prefixes ("Ki", "Gi", etc.) were created just as a quick solution for programmers who are either too lazy do to the maths properly, or too concerned about backwards compatibility. So instead of calculating the final value correctly, all they need to do is write "GiB" instead of "GB", and at least they stop being wrong . It's a different matter whether or not users will have any idea what "Gibi" means, but at least they should be able to figure out it does not mean quite the same as the "Giga" they learned at highschool.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 12:26:10 PM , Rating: 3
Well, your personal attacks make your argument right, and I've got nearly 20 years of engineering experience in computers, electronics, and software, so I don't think I'm exactly "clueless."

I can see from your post that you are slowly conceding the argument, finally admitting that the industry has always has 1kB = 1024. That's how I learned it in school, just like everyone else with engineering and/or comp sci degrees. And that's what is used all day long by people in the same field. It's not a small minority of people, BTW.

One more point I will make before I ride into the sunset is that 1K = 1024 is not due to programmers being "lazy." I would point out that it takes actually slightly more effort to calculate KB, MB, and GB in terms of powers-of-two than powers-of-ten. Which you would know if you had any clue.

Oh, one more thing, you have yet to explain why IEC prefixes have been a total failure in the industry. Besides Linux, practically nobody uses them anywhere. If they are so "right" as you say, why does practically nobody use them?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 12:27:17 PM , Rating: 2
Sorry, typo: your personal attacks make your argument right -> don't make your argument right.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:22:59 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
I can see from your post that you are slowly conceding the argument, finally admitting that the industry has always has 1kB = 1024.


Then I guess we can add "not being able to read" to your list of problems.

Hard drive sizes have always been correctly reported, by all manufacturers. A Seagate 80 GB drive has 80,000,000,000 bytes, as does a Western Digital or Hitachi or Samsung drive.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 2:33:32 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
Then I guess we can add "not being able to read" to your list of problems.

Fortunately we don't have to rely on your failed interpretation of my reading abilities, since we can simply quote what you said.

Since it wasn't practical to manufacture or address memory in chunks of exactly 1000 bytes, chunks of 1024 bytes were used instead. And since it wasn't practical to say "one point zero two four kilobytes", people just called it "one kilobyte", which is close enough and gets the point across

Which, to probably everyone else besides yourself (you're in denial obviously), means that you understand the origins of the more commonly used meaning of kilobyte, specifically 1024 bytes.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:48:56 PM , Rating: 3
I also "understand" why people might say that the Earth's diameter is "8 thousand miles". That does not mean "one mile" is defined as 1/8000th of the Earth's diameter, or that the "8000 miles" approximation should be used when calculating larger units (such as AUs, for example).

And it definitely does not mean that people who use the units correctly should be sued and labelled as "deceptive" (which is what you and several others here are doing in regard to Seagate, which correctly reports the size of its drives, as do all other manufacturers).

You mixed up GB and GiB, drew a lot of wrong conclusions from that, and now you're doing rethorical backflips, trying to change the subject. The subject is Seagate's use of the the term "gigabyte" to mean 1 billion bytes. That usage is consistent with the rest of the industry and (more importantly), it's consistent with well-established standards for numeric and engineering terminology and with the recommendations from all major standards organizations.

P.S. - FYI, I was working with computers back when the memory of most systems could be measured in bytes (not even kilobytes), so I don't need to "understand the origins" of the term; I was there when it originated.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By geddarkstorm on 10/24/2007 3:06:42 PM , Rating: 2
Maybe so, and Seagate probably is not in the wrong, but the courts will decide if the common perception of the consumer is that GB means this "GiB" unit (which is recent in and of itself, is it not?), and if that's so then they can get burned for it. Should they be? Probably not. But the fact the measurement exists that kilo is 1024 bytes and such and has been typically used in most people's common experience is not precluded by if it's being used in the way that is "correct" or not as seen by the SI. If the entire industry has normalized it by the SI way, then Seagate probably cannot be sued, but it's a dangerous world out there for businesses.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 3:49:46 PM , Rating: 3
But, you see, that is not the common perception of the meaning of the prefix "giga". People learn (or should learn) at school that "giga" means "multipled by one billion (x10^9)". And no one expects "one gigahertz" to mean "1073741824 hertz" (or maybe some people do, it wouldn't surprise me at this point).

Since there was no simple, short term for "1024 bytes", and since the people working in IT all knew that 1000 bytes was an impractical amount, they used to refer to 1024 bytes as "one kilobyte" (which is fine, if you're rounding to the nearest kilobyte). But they knew perfectly well that it was just an approximation, and that "kilo-" means "multiplied by 1000". Most of them were, after all, engineers, and very familiar with numeric terminology.

It's unfortunate (to say the least) that so many people extrapolate from the few cases where the term is still used incorrectly to the ones where it is used correctly (storage, communications, interfaces, processing speed, clock speed), instead of the other way around. I guess it just makes it even more amazing that civilization has managed to come this far.

Why does this happen? Personally I blame operating systems and software in general. If they had fixed the display of file and drive sizes when the error started to get significant (i.e., when we started to talk about "megabytes"), we wouldn't be in this state with some people passionately defending something that is simply wrong. Luckily, some modern software does use the correct terminology, so maybe there's still hope.

Seagate isn't just "right" according to the rest of the storage industry, it is also right according to all relevant standards organizations. It's unfortunate they decided not to go ahead with this case, since there was a chance it would educate some people. But they obviously know that giving away (useless) software will cost them less than paying their lawyers, and it's not like they would stand to profit anything from winning this.

In a way this reminds me of how some "IT journalists" started spreading the (meaningless) term "SATA II", going against the SATA-IO and the hardware manufacturers themselves (in fact, several industry members put up pages explaining why the term was meaningless, and what term(s) people should use instead).

http://www.serialata.org/namingguidelines.asp
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US...
etc...

But try to explain this in the average 13-year-old-troll-infested internet forum and you get flamed into oblivion ("you must be a noob who doesn't know about SATA II, blah blah blah")...


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By IGoodwin on 10/24/2007 7:04:55 PM , Rating: 2
many years ago, a disctionary would have defined the word 'gay' to mean being happy. Now it has another meaning. Just becasue something has a definition, does not mean common usage cannot change it.

It does not matter how strongly you argue that saying your boss lookeds gay, mand you thought they were happy, becasue that was it's first definition. Usage changes the definition of terms, not the other way around.

As Kilo has been used to refer to 1024 bytes by the computer inductry, it has attached, no matter how strongly you feel to the contrary. Denying the use of that meaning won't make it go away.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 11:05:46 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
many years ago, a disctionary would have defined the word 'gay' to mean being happy.


I did not know that the word "gay" was a mathematical or engineering term, defined by international standards organizations. Who exactly defines it? The Barbra Streisand Foundation?

quote:
Now it has another meaning. Just becasue something has a definition, does not mean common usage cannot change it.


Ignoring for a moment the fact that the prefix "kilo" is a well-defined engineering and mathematical standard term, that changing its meaning would render millions of documents useless, and that standards organizations don't make changes due to "common usage", your statement is still incorrect.

It is not "common usage" to consider that "kilo-" means "multiplied by 1024". On the contrary. Even in areas related to computers, the term is used correctly in most contexts (storage, clock frequencies, interface speeds, etc). It is only in a very restricted context (software display of file and RAM sizes) that the (incorrect) usage appears. And, even there, modern software is (finally!) starting to get it right.

Since that specific area of IT is subject to the same standards as everything else, it is that area that needs to be corrected. Using the term "kilobyte" to refer to 1024 bytes is fine in an informal context, just as it's fine to say that a 1024-watt sound system draws "one kilowatt". It is not fine when making accurate calculations, especially of very large values (where the error will add up).

Going back to the point of this article, Seagate is 100% correct in describing a drive with 80 billion bytes as an 80 GB drive (as is every other manufacturer - they all use the same terminology, in accordance with the IEC, ISO, IEEE and SI/CIPM).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/26/2007 11:23:41 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
Since that specific area of IT is subject to the same standards as everything else, it is that area that needs to be corrected. Using the term "kilobyte" to refer to 1024 bytes is fine in an informal context, just as it's fine to say that a 1024-watt sound system draws "one kilowatt". It is not fine when making accurate calculations, especially of very large values (where the error will add up).


1024 bytes==1 Kilobyte is standard definition and is correct
1024 watts==1 Kilowatt is your error.

If you find someone defining a Kilowatt as 1024 watts, feel free to slap them down. Electrical Engineering assigns the value of n*10^3 to the metric prefixes and has nothing whatsoever to do with computer storage measurement. The Kilowatt was defined as 1000 watts many years before the terms bit & byte were even thought of, let alone accepted as normal usage. Electrical Engineering also defines the frequency of oscillation that is referenced in CPU clock frequency. Again this is not a measure of storage.

quote:
It is only in a very restricted context (software display of file and RAM sizes) that the (incorrect) usage appears. And, even there, modern software is (finally!) starting to get it right.


Interesting. Here you state that the consistent & normal usage is the 1024 value when referring to storage, but that recent non-standard uses are showing up. Could this older (standard in 2000AD) definition that was & is considered standard possibly be the reason for the lawsuit?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/26/2007 10:58:21 AM , Rating: 2
If you were there when it originated you must have stayed clear of anything to do with real world applications :)

Floppy disks were measured in 1024 byte Kilobytes
Hard Disks were measured in 1024 Kilobyte Megabytes
Unthinkably large capacities that might exist were
1024 Megabyte Gigabytes
1024 Gigabyte Terabytes
1024 Terabyte Petabytes
In short for COMPUTER STORAGE CAPACITY you substitute 1024 for the 1000 that is used for Metric Measure. Computer capacity measurement is NOT metric. The prefixes are the same, the escalation in magnitude is similar, but the meaning is NOT the same.

If you'd bothered to read the literature & the advertising in the 70's and 80's you'd know that the byte had standardized at 8 bits, the metric prefixes when applied to computer storage referred to multiples of 2^10 instead of 10^3. You'd have also run across the articales discussing the size inflation in the 80s when HDD sizes started being stated in base 10 routinely. It may have been done in the early days, but it was considered fraudulent. At the time Seagate was sued it was still considered to be fraud. Without the footnote warning of the difference it is still considered fraud today.

For a few similar cases. 1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The Earth is not 1 AU from the sun. The Fahrenheit temperature system assigns 32 degrees as the freezing point of water and 100 degrees as the normal body temperature of a human. Actual normal temperature is usually given as 98.6F. 1 inch is defined as the lengh of 3 barleycorns. You'll need to sort the grain very carefully to find ones that are 1/3 of an inch, though they will be close. Reality often disagrees with published standards :D


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Veraiste on 10/29/2007 4:44:42 PM , Rating: 2
However, when these terms were first used, everyone understood them as the approximations they were. As these devices were commercialized, they went back to correct definition. In any case, you just reinforced his argument. The only ones using the incorrect meanings of the prefixes are software developers, likely to the historical ease and speed of bit shifting to change units.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/26/2007 10:39:42 AM , Rating: 2
Check the box the drive came in ... you will find a footnoted disclaimer to warn you that the drive size is using base 10 measure instead of the industry standard base 2 measure :P

Before somone in marketing decided to inflate their numbers drive manufacturers used the base 2 measure. After one company started using the base 10 measure the others followed along since buyers looked at the 80MB (base 2) and the 83MB (base 10) drives and bought the "Larger" one. It was sales hype not the ISO that made the base 10 values common. It was the use of base 10 values that caused people to take Seagate to court for falsely advertising 80*10^6 to be equal to 80*2^20. The footnote in tiny print on the box is the result of this lawsuit.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/29/2007 6:29:03 PM , Rating: 2
Apparently you consider that something is "the industry standard" despite the fact that no one in the industry uses it (all hard drive manufacturers consider 1 GB = 1 billion bytes) and despite the fact that all the standard organisations (IEEE, IEC, ISO, CIPM, etc) agree with that usage.

That must be a new definition of "industry standard" that means the exact opposite of what it usually means...


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Proteusza on 10/24/2007 8:31:45 AM , Rating: 2
So ISO knows more than operating system engineers and all computer pioneers in the last 30 years?

I imagine the ISO would have lots of qualified computer scientists on board, but how many of them were involved in the ground work, where the use of the terms kilobyte, gigabyte etc originated?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 3:12:37 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
So ISO knows more than operating system engineers and all computer pioneers in the last 30 years?


When it comes to defining standards? Yes. That's the whole point of the ISO (and the IEEE, and the IEC - and they all agree on this). In fact, computer-related ISO / IEEE / IEC standards were defined precisely by those "pioneers".

The SI magnitude prefixes were defined before the term "kilobyte" was coined, and the people who coined it were well aware of the fact that it was merely an approximation. No one ever defined (or tried to define) the prefix "kilo" as meaning x1024. 1024 bytes is "one kilobyte" in the same sense that 1024 (or 1025, or 998) meters is "one kilometer". Close enough for colloquial use. That does not mean accurate measurements (especially of very large quantities, where small inaccuracies can add up to a lot) shouldn't be based on the exact, standard value.

Hard drives from all manufacturers use 1 GB = 1 billion bytes. The same goes for optical media sizes, network speeds, interface speeds, CPU speeds, GPU pixel / texel / vertex processing speeds, and so on.

To turn your question around, do the people writing software know more about measuring hard drive capacity than the people making hard drives?

It's precisely to avoid having to answer such questions that there are established (ISO, IEC, etc.) standards. And, in this instance, the guys making the hard drives are the ones who got it right. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of authority and precedence.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/25/2007 8:13:10 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
It's precisely to avoid having to answer such questions that there are established (ISO, IEC, etc.) standards. And, in this instance, the guys making the hard drives are the ones who got it right. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of authority and precedence.

Wrong, as you're well aware, ISO/IEC/etc. in general do not have any "authority" to impose upon software developers or their employers that they use particular standards. Companies producing software are free to adopt or not adopt the IEC prefixes depending on what they feel is in their best interest, unless there are legal or customer requirements that state that compliance is necessary.

Just because you, in your infinite wisdom, believe strongly in the IEC standards, doesn't mean that everyone else shares the same view. Other people do have a right to their own views and judgement, right Justin?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/29/2007 6:39:57 PM , Rating: 2
Like they said in "Life of Brian", it's your right as a man to be treated as a woman. But just because you have the "right" to bear children, that doesn't mean you can actually do it.

It's your "right" to ignore all the IEC, IEEE and ISO standards and come up with completely new terms, or assign completely different meanings to existing terms.

Just don't expect to ever get a job in any area even remotely related to engineering.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/30/2007 4:42:48 AM , Rating: 2
Actually in computer related engineering it would probably be fatal to pretend that the common and accepted industry standards don't exist :P

Just try convincing folks that they need to start manufacturing 1Gigabit memory chips that have exactly 10^12 bytes. Of course you can start by retraining all those engineers who insist on using the industry standard of their industry instead of the SI standard :)


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/30/2007 9:23:24 AM , Rating: 2
Straw man argument.

There is no "standard" for "how big the memory chips must be". No one is suggesting forcing manufacturers to change the size of the drives or drive sectors (let alone memory chips, which is not even the subject of this article).

They just need to label them correctly (ie, 2^30 should be labelled as "1 GiB" or "1.07" GB).

Same thing drive manufacturers, interface card manufacturers, optical media manufacturers, network gear manufacturers, video server manufacturers, and so on already do.

Apparently you consider that something is "the industry standard" despite the fact that no one in that industry uses it (all hard drive manufacturers consider 1 GB = 1 billion bytes) and despite the fact that all the standard organisations (IEEE, IEC, ISO, CIPM, etc) agree with that usage.

That must be a new definition of "industry standard" that means the exact opposite of what it usually means...


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/26/2007 11:06:09 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
Computers should present numbers in a form that's consistent and in accordance to the standards used by normal human beings


Actually this was the reason for the original lawsuit. The consistent & commonly used multiplier for the industry was 1024. By using 1000 Seagate used numbers that were inconsistent and not in accordance to the standards used by their industry.

I also agree with your remarks about number systems. I use Hex commonly because that is the easy to read form of the format in which data is actually stored on the computer. Octal is useful also when the data is stored in 3bit groups such as *nix permissions. Using decimal when dealing with computer storage is a nightmare that I try to avoid.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:40:30 AM , Rating: 3
quote:
Justin, I also think you should read this Wiki article, since I think they got it right:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte


Wikipedia is hardly an authoritative source; for all we know you could have edited the article just now, to support your opinion. But let's look at what the article actually says:

quote:

1024 bytes [...] Most software also uses it to express storage capacity. This definition has been expressly forbidden by the SI standard

[...]

1000 bytes (103): This definition is consistent with the SI prefix, and is recommended for all uses by international standards organizations such as IEC, IEEE, and ISO , with the abbreviation "kB".


In other words, regarding the issue being discussed here (whether or not Seagate is "deceiving" people by describing a drive with, say, 60,000,000,000 bytes as having 60 GB), I think it's pretty clear that not only are they correct, but those who disagree are in violation of the SI standard.

As such (with backing from the ISO, IEC, IEEE, CIPM, etc.), Seagate would have had no problem winning this case. Only trouble is, their own lawyers' fees would cost them more than what they'll have to spend on this "settlement".

If this is your "supporting article" I think I can safely rest my case.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By mindless1 on 10/24/2007 5:11:43 AM , Rating: 1
Unfortunately SI does not have the power to redefine a term currently being used by an industry that coined it and still actively uses it. They'd LIKE to be the final word on numbers, but they might as well suggest we are expressly forbidden from calling a byte anything other than = 1.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 8:50:08 AM , Rating: 4
quote:
If this is your "supporting article" I think I can safely rest my case.

You are correct, it is recommended that these prefixes be used in authoring standards. And the reason is that it avoids the ambuiguity and is more concise.

That said, however, as the article states (and as I have said lots of times), the IEC prefixes are used very little in industry. The same industry that produces and consumes these standards.

Again, I'm not saying one is right or wrong or better or worse (frankly I don't care), I'm just pointing out that IEC prefixes are not commonly used, that's all.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 12:40:27 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
Again, I'm not saying one is right or wrong or better or worse (frankly I don't care), I'm just pointing out that IEC prefixes are not commonly used, that's all.


Following the same kind of "logic", if a lot of people think that a meter is three feet long, then anyone who converts correctly between meters and feet should be sued, and you'll post here saying "Are 3 feet equal to a meter or a yard? I'm not saying one is right or wrong blah blah blah" (and then backpedal some more from your original claims, which by now are looking quite distant).

But the thing is, one is right and one is wrong. That's kind of the point of having standards, and bodies like the ISO, IEC, IEEE and CIPM ( all of which agree on this). If different industries (or different sub-fields within each industry) got to redefine the meaning of standard units and prefixes, there would be no point in having standards to begin with.

The term "kilobyte" was used by IT pioneers as an approximation (because 1024 bytes was the closest "practical" number to one kilobyte). 3128 bytes is 3 kB if you approximate it to the nearest kilobyte. It was never meant as a "redefinition" of the prefix "kilo", and it certainly should not be used as a factor when calculating higher magnitudes.

The IEC prefixes are a cop-out. Ideally, they should not be used at all; software should just measure data set sizes properly, as do interface card manufacturers, video servers, interface makers, hard drive manufacturers, and so on.

The IEC binary prefixes are important for one reason, though: they mean there's no longer any excuse for software to continue using standard engineering terms incorrectly. If the developers don't want to fix their maths, they can at least stop being deceptive and add an "i" to their prefixes. But apparently some people are ignorant and stubborn (or too lazy to do even that).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 12:50:40 PM , Rating: 2
Hate to break it to you, but IEC, ISO, ANSI, IEEE, etc. are not in any position to dictate to industry. For the most part, industry is free to adopt, or not adopt, various standards written by the committees. You have a pretty naive view of these standards, I would say.

And the problem in this case, as I've said a dozen times, is that the IEC standard was defined 30 years after the industry already had an alternate system in place. Therefore, it will take some time for industry to adopt the IEC prefixes, if it ever does.

In a way, it's no different than the explanation as to why the US hasn't adopted the metric system. Existing widespread use takes a long time and a dedicated effort to change, not to mention a strong incentive to make the change.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/25/2007 7:41:07 PM , Rating: 2
Apparently you think that you are right and every standards organization and hardware manufacturer must be wrong.

The "industry" already has adopted a standard, and that standard happens to be the one recommended by all those international organizations. They don't "dictate" to the industry; they are part of the industry (a very important part). Your view of engineering standards seems like something straight out of the early 1700s.

Seagate measures the size of its drives exactly the same way as all other hard drive manufacturers (and interface card manufacturers, and optical media manufacturers, and network hardware manufacturers, and so on), in accordance with the standards used by every branch of science and engineering.

Posting the same misinformation a million times isn't going to change that fact, Tom (although I'm sure that won't slow you down).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/25/2007 8:07:21 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
The "industry" already has adopted a standard, and that standard happens to be the one recommended by all those international organizations.

Wrong, the industry only adopts, i.e., implements, a subset of the published standards where there is a legal requirement and/or where a business case can be made.

There are lots of standards that are written that are not widely implemented by a particular industry. For example, the IEC standard that you are so fond of that defines the new-style memory prefixes has, as you are fully aware, not been widely adopted by industry.

I've helped author a few ISO standards, so I think I'm pretty clear how the whole thing works, as well as the relationship to industry. But feel free to continue to lecture us with your obviously superior knowledge nonetheless.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By euclidean on 10/24/2007 12:40:30 PM , Rating: 4
Dude...do you even know anything about computers? or are you just a mathmetician that thinks he's better than everyone and knows everything?

Not only are you trying to blame Microsoft (probably because you have a pos 1999 computer from dell and can't run Win Vista on it) about how they write their software, you are forgetting to blame every other company out there that writes software including the open source commmunity and linux. Everyone uses the standard 1KB = 1024 bits and 1MB = 1024KB and so on and so forth. The way harddrive are read, memory is read, and even flash memory is read is the same way everything in computers have been read since they started out in the early 50s. Get over it. Hard drive manufacturers knew the difference when they started to get big in the late 90s, when 20GB drives were thought of as massive. They knew that the size of the drives were going to be different than what it was suppose to be. If you make something with 1000MB and you know that 1MB = 1024KB, you know labeling it as 1GB is going to be wrong, as there will be less space than there should be. It wasn't a big deal back then because the most people noticed missing was enough to worry about. Now that drives are getting in the TB size and hundreds of GBs, the difference is a lot more and noticeable. I know a handful of people that have complained about the size labeling, I even had to explain it to people in the past as to why they were getting what they thought they paid for. The reason: HDD Manufacturers were using a different measurement than what the computer world used, even though they used the same labeling method. I know the different standards, but in this type of case, it doesn't matter. Computers were first, before HDDs, and I can pull out a handfull of old HDDs that are labeled correctly, that state they have 584MB of space, and actually have 584MB of space.

My point is, The HDD manufacturers knew what they were doing, and knew the sizes were going to be off, but decided to keep going down this route because a 250GB harddrive sounded a lot better than a 232.8GB Harddrive. Plus it made them more money, and in a corporate enviroment, that's all that matters, especially to the stock holders. I think that A. they should make Seagate pay back for what they mislabeled, and all of the other HDD manufacturers as well. and B. they should also make the HDD manufacturers re-label their drives to a more correct size. Think of ISPs that advertise "up-to" 10Mbps download speeds. you know they get away with it by saying "up-to". HDDs should be labeled to a more general form, maybe "225GB or up-to 232.8GB".


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:33:21 PM , Rating: 2
FYI, I have a degree in systems engineering, worked as a full-time programmer for 5 years (I still code as part of my job, but mostly just graphics now), and was probably designing digital circuits before you were a glint in the milkman's eye. I just happen to have some contact with the real world, which some (most) developers seem to lack.

Oh, and I'm typing this on my low-end (2 GHz quad-core) system. You're right about Vista, though; it won't run it, but that's because I'm not a masochist.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By euclidean on 10/24/2007 3:32:32 PM , Rating: 1
Sweet. but ya I guess you were doing that before I was a glint in my mom's milkman's eye....though she never had a milkman...

Neways I'm in my mid 20's working for Eaton Corp in L3 IT Support...I hated coding back in college, that shit was boring as hell. Glad some people like it cause I'd hate for that to be mandatory for my job. But still, what I was saying about what you do was sarcasm...of course you really can't tell that on the internet...


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 10:48:45 PM , Rating: 3
Also, for the record,
quote:
1 GiHz = 2^30 Hz = 1,073,741,824 Hz

is the most idiodic thing I've heard all day. I can practically guarantee that has never been used in the industry except as a typo by a lay person.

The point of using "Gi" is to avoid ambiguity between SI-based 10^9 and classic/legacy 2^30, not to introduce a new set of prefixes to go be used in addition to SI prefixes.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 3:10:11 AM , Rating: 3
The fact that something "has been used" (or not) is irrelevant . You seem to think that standards and terminology can be freely modified (or "repurposed", as you call it) by anyone, thus completely missing the point of having standards and terminology to begin with.

One gibihertz is 1,073,741,824 hertz regardless of whether the term has any use or not , simply because the IEC prefix "gibi" stands for 2^30. Thus, a gibimeter is 1,073,741,824 meters, just as a mole of potatos means 6.022×10^23 potatos. I don't actually have to own that many potatos (or even consider whether they could exist, or whether that number would be useful in any way related to potatos) to understand what the term means .

Saying that 1024 bytes are "one kilobyte" is more or less the same as saying that 1024 (or 1025, or 990) meters are "one kilometer". It's an approximation, and in most cases good enough. But that does not mean that you have somehow redefined the meaning of the prefix "kilo". It just means you decided to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of practicality. If you can't understand the difference, well, then let's just say I wouldn't cross a bridge designed by you.

"Giga" is an internationally and interdisciplinarily accepted standard prefix that means "multiplied by 10^9". It doesn't matter what unit you apply it to - meters, bits, bytes, hertz, or potatos. It always means the same thing. That's the whole point of having a standard magnitude prefix.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By mindless1 on 10/24/2007 5:15:39 AM , Rating: 2
LOL, the fact that something "has been used" is exactly what makes it the standard. They tried to REdefine, which is not acceptible practice. Find a new term, not byte if you want to validate SI terms because they're invalid.

If I declare myself an expert on tomato standards, can I insist you are expressly forbidden from calling them tomatos anymore? Of course I can, but you're not going to do it are you? Once a term is established and used by an industry, a 3rd party has no input on it's meaning.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By zpdixon on 10/24/2007 1:11:24 AM , Rating: 5
Contrary to common belief, power-of-10 prefixes (as used by disk manufacturers) are more commonly used than power-of-2 prefixes in the computer industry. As seen in the list below, power-of-10 prefixes apply to things varying from bytes to bits to Hz to baud. They also apply to every domain: data throughput, processor speed, stream bandwidth, and storage capacity:

o A 4000 MB/s HyperTransport link is 4000 * 10^6 byte/s (power of 10)
o A 2.5 GHz processor is 2.5 * 10^9 Hz (power of 10)
o A 128 kbit/s audio stream is 128 * 10^3 bit/s (power of 10)
o A PC3200 (as in 3200 MByte/s) memory stick is 3200 * 10^6 byte/s (power of 10)
o A 480 Mbit/s USB2 link is 480 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
o A 8 kbaud (56 kbps) V.92 modem is 8 * 10^3 baud/s (power of 10)
o A 2.5 Gbit/s PCI-e lane (after 8b/10b encoding) is 2.5 * 10^9 bit/s (power of 10)
o A 250 MB/s PCI-e lane (before 8b/10b encoding) is 250 * 10^6 byte/s (power of 10)
o A 1 Gbit/s ethernet card is 1 * 10^9 bit/s (power of 10)
o A 54 Mbit/s 802.11g network 54 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
o A 3.0 Gbit/s SATA link (after 8b/10b encoding) is 3.0 * 10^9 bit/s (power of 10)
o A 300 MB/s SATA link (before 8b/10b encoding) is 300 * 10^6 byte/s (power of 10)
o A 6 Mbit/s DSL line is 6 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
o A 2 GByte USB flash drive is 2 * 10^9 byte/s (power of 10)
o Curiosity: a 1.44 MByte floppy disk is 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 byte (mix of power of 10 and 2 !)
o And of course, a 500 GByte hard disk drive is 500 * 10^9 byte (power of 10)

Why do people think that power-of-2 prefixes should be the norm when the only few places where they are used are to refer to file sizes and RAM capacity ?


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 3:12:38 AM , Rating: 2
Amen!


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 9:15:57 AM , Rating: 3
These are nearly all "bitrate" measures, which do commonly use powers-of-ten. These are generally based on powers-of-ten crystals, so that makes sense.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By CascadingDarkness on 10/24/2007 7:11:24 PM , Rating: 2
Me too. I like your Metric comparison.

Basically Justin is making the argument similar to Metric making sense. Good luck getting mechanics on your side when telling them "your wrong" (as in scheme they use). They are working with an existing scheme that has worked for years and don't want to change overnight. You'll also likely get an answer "it works!"

It's basically same thing for this entire argument. GB and GiB have been used interchangably in past. Yes we all get that was a mistake, guess what. They now mean the same thing in use. You can scream technical definitions all you want, all I give a damn about is how it's used in the Real World . GB is over all term. Everyone I have ever met that had the slightest clue what GB was thought it was what techinically is GiB. The one exception to this is HD manu. Which I also agree with Tom was likely someone from Marketing relizing they could give 7% less for same amount, and only tech guys would notice.

I have used the terms interchangably. I knew better, but did I really want to explain the difference to everyone, every time I wrote GiB instead of GB? No. Even though we were both talking about the exact same thing.

Yes, GB=1000 GiB=1024 makes sense, but sadly Justin is making this argument 20 years too late, it's fully ingrained in everyone the wrong way now.

I suppose you can scream technicalities all you want. Us tech guys are going to cash in our 5% refunds for the 7% of space we know we were jipped out of to begin with, and we'll keep on using the wrong abbreviation anyway. Just because we don't want to explain GiB every time we mark a file size.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Veraiste on 10/29/2007 5:03:14 PM , Rating: 2
You weren't jipped out of anything. Prices would have changed accordingly if they represented disk space as GiB in the first place.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Kuroyama on 10/24/2007 12:55:18 PM , Rating: 2
You've just given the lawyers a whole list of other industries to sue.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By geddarkstorm on 10/24/2007 1:45:33 PM , Rating: 2
Be careful. A bit or byte per second is a totally different unit than a bit or byte by itself; and therefore can have a different prefix definition. For instance, a kilowatt is 1000 joules per second. A kilowatt-hour though is not a kilowatt of energy being used per hour, it's over an hour the use of 3.600x10^6 joules in energy, not 1000 joules/second at any one given time (here, kilo is the equivalent of an SI mega!). It is a totally different unit with different meanings and so forth. And, where kilowatt is an SI unit, kilowatt-hour is not, yet it is used every time to calculate how much you own on your utility bill.

The computer science world long ago defined what a bit and byte were, and then what prefixes before them would mean. I.E. they defined that for say memory modules, a kilo prefix was a power of 2, not 10. SI has nothing to do with anything; it's just using the same word but different definition which is a common phenomenon in language and science.

For instance, an anode is a positively charged terminal of a wire, whereas an anion is a negatively charged atom. So, in chemistry the an- prefix means negative, and in the electrical sciences the an- prefix means positive. Same prefix, opposite definitions! (this arose from how the definitions came to be, and it's not going to be changed) This meaning reversal is the same for the cat- prefix used in both sciences.

Obviously the companies thought that since the prefix was the same as SI, it should slip into base 10, but in the sciences, this is not the case and Giga, if pared with the Byte unit, is a base 2 measurement. This, again, comes from how it was defined during the foundation of the science. Now, it could change one day, and maybe it is now with this Gi thing. But I've never seen this Gi thing anywhere in the sciences yet, so I wouldn't hold your breath for it to become an accepted measurement. And just because it exists, it does not change the meaning of all the current bodies of work and journals already published. Know what the language means in its proper context.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:00:14 PM , Rating: 2
It's amazing the mental gymanstics some people will make just to avoid acknowledging that their original statement was wrong.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By geddarkstorm on 10/24/2007 2:35:23 PM , Rating: 2
You are obviously not paying much attention to what is being said. IT world does not use SI for its bytes and bits units, which, are themselves, their own creation. Therefore, even if they use the same word for a prefix multiplier of number, it does not mean for one moment its based on the same math that the SI system uses. This is a common thing, not rare nor isolated.

It's funny how you assume anything that says kilo or giga must be SI without for one moment thinking about the context or that word meanings are never intrinsic but given. Read the body of literature in the scientific community in regards to computers and the conventions of using kilo and giga as base 2 modifiers for byte and bit units (bit/second and byte/second are totally different units) is constant; it is how it is defined. They do not use them in the sense that the SI does, irregardless of what you think.

There are many examples of non SI conventions using the same words, I still can't believe you hold to this strange notion that if the spelling is the same it must be SI.

Now what is the industry standard outside of the scientific? The courts will decide that apparently.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 4:04:59 PM , Rating: 2
The "IT world" bases its standards on the same organizations as every other field of engineering. Namely the CIPM, the ISO, the IEC and the IEEE. And they all seem to disagree with you (and agree with Seagate).

Sometimes reality is highly biased against "personal truthiness".


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By zpdixon on 10/24/2007 3:26:22 PM , Rating: 2
Dude, your post is an absolute non sequitur. I am talking about bit/sec ("kW/h"), not bit-sec ("kW-h") !

Beside, you don't refute my point at all, which was that power-of-10 prefixes are more commonly used than power-of-2 prefixes (and I list the facts to prove it).


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/27/2007 4:41:44 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
o A 4000 MB/s HyperTransport link is 4000 * 10^6 byte/s (power of 10)

Correct it is measuring throughput not storage capacity.

quote:
o A 2.5 GHz processor is 2.5 * 10^9 Hz (power of 10)

Correct the measurement is clock frequency not storage capacity.

quote:
o A 128 kbit/s audio stream is 128 * 10^3 bit/s (power of 10)

Correct the measure is throughput, not storage capacity.

quote:
o A PC3200 (as in 3200 MByte/s) memory stick is 3200 * 10^6 byte/s (power of 10)

Correct. The PCnnnn rating indicates data transfer speed but is not necessarily the same as the Mb/s

quote:
o A 480 Mbit/s USB2 link is 480 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)

Correct. Again this is a measure of throughput not storage capacity.

o
quote:
A 8 kbaud (56 kbps) V.92 modem is 8 * 10^3 baud/s (power of 10)

That should be "An 8 Kbaud" and "56 Kbitps". The first is complete nonsense, the 2d correction is required to be consistent with the IEC Standard. The modem speed is 56 kilo bits per second. The IEC standard defines k as 1/1000 and K as 1000. They further specify that bit will never be abbreviated, B will be used only for Bel and b will be correct usage for Byte.
Baud is the number of data elements per second. If 1 data element encodes 3 bits then the bits per second rate will be 3 times the baud rate. As baud is a fixed quantity, baud/s is a nonsense statement that violates the definition of the term.
Here is a quick explanation of baud at Answer.com: http://www.answers.com/topic/baud?cat=biz-fin

quote:
o A 2.5 Gbit/s PCI-e lane (after 8b/10b encoding) is 2.5 * 10^9 bit/s (power of 10)

Correct. This is a measure of throughput, not storage capacity.

quote:
o A 250 MB/s PCI-e lane (before 8b/10b encoding) is 250 * 10^6 byte/s (power of 10)

Correct. This is a measure of throughput, not storage capacity.

quote:
o A 1 Gbit/s ethernet card is 1 * 10^9 bit/s (power of 10)

Correct though often this one will be read as 2^30 since it is assumed that a 1 Gbit/s data rate will transfer a 1/8 Gb file in 1 sec. The confusion results from an engineering definition being applied where context implies the rate being defined in the same terms as the items being transferred. In reality the file size is calculated using 2^(n*10) and the transfer rate is ic calculated using 10^(n*3)

quote:
o A 54 Mbit/s 802.11g network 54 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)

Correct. It is measuring throughput. Though the difference is irrelevant in the real world due to protocol overhead & error correction.

quote:
o A 3.0 Gbit/s SATA link (after 8b/10b encoding) is 3.0 * 10^9 bit/s (power of 10)

Throughput

quote:
o A 300 MB/s SATA link (before 8b/10b encoding) is 300 * 10^6 byte/s (power of 10)

Throughput

quote:
o A 6 Mbit/s DSL line is 6 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)

Throughput

quote:
o A 2 GByte USB flash drive is 2 * 10^9 byte/s (power of 10)

Nope
A flash drive uses flash memory sticks. Memory is measured using 2^30 per Gb.

quote:
o Curiosity: a 1.44 MByte floppy disk is 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 byte (mix of power of 10 and 2 !)

This one is a Microsoft standard. The 1.44 capacity exists only on MSDOS formatted disks. Commodore formats this disk at just over 1.6Mb. Commodore used 1024 bytes per Kb and 1024 Kb per Mb when stating capacity.
Similarly the MSDOS 360Kb disk was also the MSDOS 320Kb disk, MSDOS 180Kb, MSDOS 160Kb Commodore 170Kb, Commodore 340Kb, Commodore 500Kb and Commodore 1Mb depending on which drive and format was used. The manual for the Commodore 8250 correctly states the capacity of the formatted disk as 4133 256 byte blocks free (1.009 M2b) even though it was advertised as a nominal 1Mb per disk drive.

Microsoft has a long history of defining proprietary "standards" and insisting that they be the industry standard. When a "1.44" floppy is formatted using the Microsoft CAB format the capacity is around 1.6 Mb. This disk is normally called "3 and a half inch floppy" but is actually 90mm :) There is a High Density version also that was commonly referred to as a 2.88 in reference to it's Microsoft defined capacity when formatted using MSDOS.

quote:
o And of course, a 500 GByte hard disk drive is 500 * 10^9 byte (power of 10)

Due to the incorrect usage, Seagate was sued and drive specifications explicitly state that base 10 rather than the correct base 2 definition is used.

quote:
Why do people think that power-of-2 prefixes should be the norm when the only few places where they are used are to refer to file sizes and RAM capacity ?

Wait a minute. You began this whole thing by declaring that what you now state is correct was wrong. The norm is file size and storage capacity. You may not have read enough of the history of computers ... Hard Disk Drives are computer memory. It is slow compared to DRAM which is why you should avoid letting Windows use the Seagate memory device installed on your machine (you can do this by disabling Virtual Memory)


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By zpdixon on 10/28/2007 12:06:23 AM , Rating: 2
Perhaps you should re-read this part of my post : "[SI prefixes] also apply to every domain: data throughput, processor speed, stream bandwidth, [...]". Ignoring these domains certainly doesn't make you right.

By the way, here are 2 more storage capacity examples:
o A 50 GB dual-layer Blu-ray Disc is 50 * 10^9 byte (power of 10)
o A 4.7 GB single-layer DVD is 4.7 * 10^9 byte (power of 10)

I wrote "baud/s" instead of "baud"; this was just a mistake. Also I am right when writing "kbaud" with a lowercase k. You should read:

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) - SI prefixes - http://www.bipm.org/en/si/prefixes.html
Design and Engineering of Intelligent :wink: Communication Systems - page 433 - http://xrl.us/7rv8

Care to provide links to authoritative sources for your ridiculous claims (such as "The IEC standard defines k as 1/1000") ?

I am also right about USB flash drives. For example capacity of my iPod shuffle is 1,040,711,680 bytes, which is 1.041 GB or 0.969 GiB. In other words 1 GB with some extra capacity (like hard disk manufacturers do, e.g. my 250 GB hard disk is 250,059,350,016 bytes: 250 GB + 59 extra MB), but certaintly not 1 GiB .

quote:

Wait a minute. You began this whole thing by declaring that what you now state is correct was wrong. The norm is file size and storage capacity.


No. The examples I listed prove you are wrong. You even acknowledged many of them ("correct... throughput..."). I don't know what else to do to convince you, other than post again those related to storage capacity:

o A 50 GB dual-layer Blu-ray Disc is 50 * 10^9 byte (power of 10)
o A 4.7 GB single-layer DVD is 4.7 * 10^9 byte (power of 10)
o A 6 Mpixel digital camera is 6 * 10^6 pixel (power of 10)
o A 2 GByte USB flash drive is 2 * 10^9 byte/s (power of 10)
o A 1.44 MByte floppy disk is 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 byte (mix of power of 10 and 2 !)
o A 500 GByte hard disk drive is 500 * 10^9 byte (power of 10)

- Z


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/29/2007 6:52:17 AM , Rating: 2
Mmy mistake on the abbreviations. The reference came from this discussion of the standard: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/information-units.t...

One of the things noted in the above linked document is that SI does NOT reuse abbreviations in order to avoid confusion. B and b are both currently recognized though b can be retired as noted by the author of the comments on the standard. (NIST says b (barn) is a deprecated unit that should not be used)

The US NIST has a nice website dedicated to the SI standard & SI approved additional definitions: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/index.html

They note that the 1024 multiplier was used due to binary number system in the computer industry and that this conventional usage was not a problem until people unfamiliar with binary numbering started reading computer related articles. They also note that the confusion has been further compounded by the failure of drive manufacturers to remain consistent with the standard usage within the computer industry. It was this confusion caused by failure to comply with conventional usage and the possibility that people unfamiliar with computers would fail to find out what the computer terms meant that caused the adoption of a paralell set of standard prefixes that to this day are largely unadopted.

As many here have noted, regardless of what drive manufacturers may put in their marketing material, the software continues to report all storage, regardless of medium or format in multiples of 2^10.

On the usage of baud. There is a lot of disagreement on this one.

Chip manufacturers regard baud as a rate so the correct form is <number> baud. the number may have an SI prefix letter attatched as a suffix e.g. 64k baud

ITU in a standards document states that baud is a unit of variable size. The numeric designator being the number of bauds that will fit in a 1 second duration. They state that the SI prefixes are valid for baud.

So 6000 baud is either
6000 transitions/s in which case the correct form is 6k baud
or
6000 bauds in which case the correct form is 6 kbaud

The ITU states that measures of bits per second be specified as bits per second. Usage of baud in this context is a violation of the standard. A 56k modem is 56 kbit/s. This conforms with the hardware design also as a 56k modem transmits multiple bits per baud. If I remember correctly the baud rate on these modems is in the neighborhood of 9600. Not sure of the exact value...too long since I read a description of how they achieve the high bits/s speed, but it is by using a modulation that allows encoding multiple bits into a single value. This concept is used in touchtone phones. Each "beep" is a tone pair and each member of the pair can have one of 4 values. This allows each "beep" to represent 4 bits of information (16 unique values). Each touchtone "beep" would be a baud as defined by the ITU-T

The ITU-T document is here: http://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T...

For bits. NIST allows "b", ITU-T says "bit" is the abbreviation and this is the usage in their documents.

The drive manufacturers remain in violation of the common and accepted norm. The 10^3 sizes are printed in the marketing material. The 2^10 sizes are reported when the media are examined by software tools. I would tend to believe the value reported by the industry standard tools. Salesman are not required to adhere to the industry standard as long as they offer a disclaimer stating that they are deviating from the industry standard. Published drive capacities have the disclaimer. Capacity reported by industry standard tools do not offer a disclaimer. This difference leads me to believe that the drive manufacturers do knowingly misstate the drive capacity by using a unit of measure that is not supported by any other computing application. RAM based storage devices have their capacity given in 2^10 multiples. To be consistent they should be reporting in 10^3 multiples even though this will produce some very nasty base 10 numbers, the very same problem that caused computer programmers to use multiples of 2^10 0x400 or $0400 in hex notation. The 1024 is used in programming for exactly the same reason as 1000 is used when the number base is 10. Programmers simply decided that defining 0x400 as 1000 to make it look nicer would cause more problems than it was worth :)


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Spotacus on 10/24/2007 1:13:25 AM , Rating: 1
Actually, if you look at the properties for your drive or for any file, you'll find that they list the actual number of bytes (GB as you would say) and what the software actually uses (GiB). So operating systems haven't really been reporting the wrong size.

It is just that a nice round number sounds better than what you'll actually be able to use (300 sounds better than 279). What I don't understand is why hard drive companies can't make hard drives that come to a nice round useable (GiB) amount. That would be the best of both worlds, sounds good for advertising and no calculating how much space is actually useable.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By shaunbed on 10/24/2007 8:10:14 AM , Rating: 3
The definition for Giga/mega/kilo/tera,etc. byte that the software industry has used is wrong and everyone in it *should* know this by now.

For a long time now, many hardware manufacturers have specified their hard drive sizes in SI with an annotation on their documentation specifing the official SI definition of a megabyte, etc.

The specification for alternate units became an official standard around 1999 at which point their was no good reason to assume the wrong definition for the units.

Here is some commentary on the standardization of units:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

Here is a link to Knuth's take on the issue of the binary megabyte, etc (old). See the section "What is a kilobyte?"
http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/news99.htm...

My opinion would be that before 1999, this lawsuit might have had merit based on the computer industry's proliferation of an incorrect standard. However, after the official standardization of the term, the lawsuit has little or no merit.

Now, if someone wanted to sue a manufacturer for presenting a harddrive size in binary rather than decimal that would be a perfectly reasonable lawsuit technically because size was misrepresented. Though, I wonder why anyone would want to complain for getting more than they expected as 2^10 > 10^3.

As an aside, the official names are aweful and I don't plan on ever using them. I tend to use the old (wrong) names and clarify when necessary. I might go to binary megabyte but never MiB. I am sure my view would be different if I worked in academia.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Spivonious on 10/24/2007 10:08:06 AM , Rating: 2
The standard in the industry is powers of 2.

If I came in and said "wait a mile is now 5000 feet, and the old mile (5280 feet) is now to be called a mibile," people would laugh at me and continue using the old mile. This is exactly what happened in the computer industry. Everyone knows that 1kB = 1024 (2^10) bytes. No one is going to switch all of a sudden just because someone came along and said "no wait, now it's the kiB."


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Veraiste on 10/29/2007 5:09:32 PM , Rating: 2
It is hardly standard in the industry. It is only standard use by software developers in regards to disks. That is a fairly niche portion of the industry. It needs to be taken in context. 2^x with software. 10^x with anything else. Its not that hard. Its as bad as people that are positive a byte is 8 bits. It *usually* is and most developers only use x86 Intel systems, but there are many platforms were it is defined differently. Assuming 8 bits is just sloppy programming.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By pomaikai on 10/25/2007 3:10:28 PM , Rating: 2
Justin is correct, GB stands for giga. a byte is a single unit. This is an INTERNATIONAL STANDARD.

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
This is a page from National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Examples and comparisons with SI prefixes
one kibibit 1 Kibit = 210 bit = 1024 bit
one kilobit 1 kbit = 103 bit = 1000 bit
one mebibyte 1 MiB = 220 B = 1 048 576 B
one megabyte 1 MB = 106 B = 1 000 000 B
one gibibyte 1 GiB = 230 B = 1 073 741 824 B
one gigabyte 1 GB = 109 B = 1 000 000 000 B

Your lack of understanding does not make others(Seagate in this case) liers.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/30/2007 4:38:03 AM , Rating: 2
G is an SI standard. B is also a standard recognized by the various international standards committees. the International Standard expansion of GB is GigaBel :)

However for historical reasons it is read in context as GigaByte with the understanding that Giga==1024^3 & Byte is the octet, unless otherwise noted, when the usage is in the field of computer science.

The standard abbreviation for bit defined by the ITU-T is bit. ITU-T is the present day successor to the CCITT which was the successor to CCIT and is presently the organization responsible for telegraphy related standards. As the basic unit of data, the definition of bit falls to them. Byte also has no standard abbreviation.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Fritzr on 10/26/2007 9:59:14 AM , Rating: 2
Justin

The METRIC system of measurement is based on powers of 10. The standard prefixes for METRIC measure are K, M, G etc. for Kilo, Mega, Giga etc.

The BINARY system of numbering is not part of the metric system. It is not required to conform to the rules of the metric system. In the BINARY system of notation K=2^10, M=2^20, G=3^30, T=2^40, P=2^50. The ISO may have written a standard that redefined the BINARY prefixes, but that new standard is not the one that is in use.

The 8bit computers had a 64KB address space. This did not mean they were limited to 64000 Bytes, it meant they were limited to 65536 Bytes. The K represents 2^10, The B represents "Byte". The word Byte originally meant the standard data size for a computer, and now has been standardized as 8 bits. The prefixes were taken from the metric system & assigned new meanings in the Binary system of measurement.

The reassignment of meaning is common. The weight of one pound can vary wildly. To establish how many ISO Metric Standard Grams are in one pound you need to first establish which pound you are measuring. Is it Troy, Avoirdupois or one of the others? Similarly one gallon has at least 3 different measures when defined in centiliters. US Standard Gallon, English Standard Gallon, Imperial Gallon. The US fluid ounce is approximately 4% larger than the English fluid ounce, so if the label says 1 US Gallon of petrol & the container actually has 1 English Gallon of petrol then the buyer has been shorted 4% of the petrol they purchased.

The usage of METRIC numbering to define disk capacity has been around for many years. It was a marketing gimmick. The techs used the powers of 2 definition, the people writing sales brochures used the powers of 10 definition. The reason for this had nothing to do with Standard Definitions of prefixes. Quite the opposite since the powers of 2 at the time were the only accepted standard for computer hardware storage. However you could market a 40MB HDD as being 7% larger than your competitor's 40MB HDD just by changing the definition of MB then using the inflated number on your box. This is the origon of the tiny print on the box that warns people that the manufacturer is using the powers of 10 and not the industry standard powers of 2.

Binary is much older than Metric BTW. In English & American Standard systems the measures are all powers of 2. 1 Pint is 2^4 ounces, 1 Gallon is 2^7 ounces, 1 Quart is 2^8 ounces, 1 Pound (English/American Standard) is 2^4 ounces. Like some computer systems the Troy system used by jewelers has to be different...1 pound is 12 ounces & the ounce is not the same weight as the one the Post Office uses :) There is also a seperate system that was in use by apothecaries that uses the same weights & measures names, but assigns different values than are now in common use.

In distances. A mile is 1000 paces or 5000 feet. It was later redefined as 5280 feet for convenience. The measure of distance based on the mile is also binary. 1 furlong (furrow length) is 1/(2^3) amiles. Chains, cables, rods etc. are similarly defined as 1/(2^n) miles. They are usually written in terms of their yardage as the yard is the most common of the shorter units now in use.

Common usage has extended the usage of the METRIC prefixes to mean powers of 10 when NOT applied to computer capacity. When applied to computers the prefixes have had the BINARY system value for over 50 yrs now.

As far as the absolute definition of a measurement. Once the basis of the measure is defined then it can be defined in ANY other measure system which has a known base measure. Since the measurement of a meter is now defined in absolute physical terms that has nothing whatever to do with the absolute value of a "meter" then you can also standardize a foot as multiples of that same base measure. This does not make the foot part of the metric system, but does allow conversion of measures in one system to an absolute value in the other system. Without this agreement on an underlying absolute standard that both define then any conversion will vary according to the margin of error involved in calculating a base value that is undefined in one of the systems. You see this commonly in currency exchange where the value of one unit of currency is defined without any regard for an underlying universal value that is independent of the system of measures.

You may wish to consult Colliers, Britannica or other encyclopedia whose reputation is based on accuracy. Wikipedia's claim to fame is that anyone can alter any entry to say anything they want without regard for truth or accuracy. Their claim is that most 'editors' will put in correct information or correct errors. That last part means that it is your responsibility to research the information you just got from Wikipedia and edit any errors you may find :P


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By Nighteye2 on 10/24/2007 6:46:10 AM , Rating: 2
Actually, if you calculate it you get 93,5% (1/1,07) of the space you paid for - so the return should be 6,5%, not 7%. That still leaves 1,5% unexplained-for, though.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By markitect on 10/24/2007 9:48:54 AM , Rating: 2
It's called a deal, Seagate know they would win but figure 5% is less then their legal expenses. The plaintiff knows they will loose, so they are taking 5% and running.

Also all HDD manufacturers do this, I don't see why its just Seagate. I almost feel bad about signing up for my free money.


RE: 5% vs. 7%
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 9:59:31 AM , Rating: 2
Suppose I sued Seagate and claimed that using Seagate HDDs caused lightbulbs to burn out prematurely throughout my office and home. And suppose I also claimed that there is a whole class of users with the same problem that we wanted to represent. Do you think in this case Seagate would also settle out of court and agree to cash refunds, plus payment of plaintiff's attorney fees?

No, in this case the truth would be clearly on Seagate's side, and so the case would be thrown out of court, or else Seagate would offer some token payment, e.g., $10K, to make me go away, which I, knowing the truth is not on my side, would happily accept.

Comparing this thought experiment to the current situation, I conclude that there must be some truth to the accusations if Seagate is concerned about either a protracted legal battle or if they agree to pay a multi-million-dollar out of court settlement.


Excellent Settlement
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 8:28:32 PM , Rating: 4
I think this is a good outcome, because it is my opinion that HDD makers intentionally exploited the difference between GB and GiB in their advertising all through the years.

All modern HDDs have internal sector sizes that are powers-of-two, and therefore, it would be most natural to express the total capacity as a power-of-two (e.g., GB) measure, rather than GiB. You have to go out of your way or invent some reason to use GiB, which clearly is IMO to increase the customer-perceived size of the drive.




RE: Excellent Settlement
By Justin Case on 10/23/2007 8:44:32 PM , Rating: 3
1 GB = 10^9 B (power of 10, SI magnitude prefix)
1 GiB = 2^30 B (power of 2, non-SI, used by software)


RE: Excellent Settlement
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 8:46:18 PM , Rating: 2
You're right, I got 'em mixed up!


RE: Excellent Settlement
By FITCamaro on 10/23/2007 8:59:20 PM , Rating: 3
Uh no. Its not the hard drive manufacturers fault people are stupid and don't realize the difference between 10^9 bytes and 2^30 bytes.

I have no problem with the way hard drive manufacturers advertise their drives because I actually pay attention to what I'm buying. It said it on the package what you were actually buying. And that formatted capacity would be lower than stated capacity.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 9:07:50 PM , Rating: 2
Sorry, you're wrong, since obviously the judge/jury drove Seagate (and other HDD manufacturers before it) to this type of settlement. They believed it was misrepresentation.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By FITCamaro on 10/23/2007 9:13:02 PM , Rating: 3
Just because a manufacturer decides to settle because it'll cost them less in the end than a drawn out legal battle, doesn't make it right.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 9:42:41 PM , Rating: 1
I agree, however, if the facts were on their side, they probably wouldn't be so worried about a drawn-out legal battle.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By FITCamaro on 10/23/2007 10:25:05 PM , Rating: 1
The facts are that the drive says 250GB on the package. Also on the package it says 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Not 2^30 bytes.

People failed to read the package and instead blamed the drive manufacturers for their oversight. Seagate knew taking it to court would cost far more than the amount of money they'd have to pay out to people for these drives as most people haven't even heard of the suit. They weren't afraid of the legal battle, they just realized the futility of one and the pointlessness of the expense.

So they'll give the $2.50 - $20 (for their $400 1TB drives) to a few tens of thousands which will add up to less than a million bucks probably which will be far less than the legal fees of a trial. They'd probably have won.

This won't hurt their sales at all either since anyone who knows computers, knows that Seagate makes some of the best drives out there.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 10:55:03 PM , Rating: 1
You seem to have a lot of inside information and details about Seagate's legal position, their costs, and the expected submission rate and total cost of settling. So I'll defer to your knowledge of the same.

...or are you just making all that up?


RE: Excellent Settlement
By FITCamaro on 10/24/2007 6:52:33 AM , Rating: 2
I'm looking at it how I would look at it if I were them. Then making a guess.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By tmouse on 10/24/2007 2:36:51 PM , Rating: 2
Most people will not have the required proof of purchase to collect. So I doubt this will cost Seagate that much, also sometimes juries can form very strange opinions about what a person deserves and that could have cost them ALOT more. There was NO determination of right or wrong, Seagate must have figured it was cheaper this way with minimal cost.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 11:01:12 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Also on the package it says 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Q: Why do you think that disclaimer is necessary on the package?

A: Because in absence of it, most consumers will assume that 1GB = 2^30 bytes, and that nearly all computer systems that the drive would be used in would correctly report the capacity as 1GB. In other words, the disclaimer is necessary to help avoid a claim of false advertising.

Also, as you well know, that disclaimer was not present in drives a few years ago. It has been added in response to suits like these.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By FITCamaro on 10/24/2007 7:00:24 AM , Rating: 3
quote:
most consumers will assume that 1GB = 2^30 bytes,


The majority of people don't have a clue that 1GB is 2^30 bytes. All they know is that the package says 250GB and the formatted capacity says 233GB or so.

You can argue with me all you want. You're not going to convince me that Seagate or any other drive manufacturer did anything wrong. It has long been understood what the measurement for a gigabyte was on a hard drive. You don't have to be a computer expert to know it either.

And maybe the disclaimer that a gigabyte for a drive is measured as one billion bytes maybe has only been there a few years, but the disclaimer that formatted capacity will be lower than advertised capacity has been there as long as I can remember.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By sinful on 10/24/2007 1:02:02 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
People failed to read the package and instead blamed


Just because you state you're doing something deceptive in fine print doesn't make it any less wrong.

If you require people to become an expert in every field in order not to be ripped off, you've lost. What happens when your cell phone company redefines "minutes" to be 30 seconds, vs. a "Minute" which is 60 seconds. Is it OK if they spell it out on page 434 of their contract?

And then when you go to compare plans between companies you mistakenly think the deceptive company has a better plan. "Wow, company X has 1000 minutes for the same price as 500 Minutes at company Y!"

In other words, the company that is not trying to deceive their customers is going to be run out of business by the less ethical company.

Is this what you really want?

Seagate knew they were treading on thin ice; even if they might be OK by the letter of the law, they probably knew they would fail on the spirit of the law.

And saying "oh, well I knew better" is a silly position to take. What would happen if the power companies did this? What if Auto makers fudged with the MPG definition, or the Horsepower rating?

Are you going to read up and become an expert in every field in which they mess with the definitions?

Isn't it better for EVERYONE involved to avoid these games?

Ultimately, even the companies benefit from a level playing field, since they're not wasting effort on deceptive games and trying to educate the consumer.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:49:40 AM , Rating: 2
Seagate (and all other hard drive manufacturers) have always used the term "giga" with its correct meaning ("one billion"), so your analogy is the wrong way around. A 60 GB drive does have one billion bytes (a bit more, in fact).

If anyone is using the term "giga" deceptively it's the people trying to pretend it means "one billion, seventy three million seven hundred and forty-one thousand eight hundred and twenty four".


RE: Excellent Settlement
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 1:12:32 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Seagate (and all other hard drive manufacturers) have always used the term "giga" with its correct meaning ("one billion")

True, but you cannot say the same about MB, since it was during the MB-size era when HDD companies made the transition from powers-of-two to powers-of-ten. Therefore, if you look at drives from that era, you see earlier drives rated one way and later drives rated another way.

This is not surprising, really, since the MB distortion is only +4.8% for MB versus +7.4% for GB and +10.0% for TB. It was clear to the HDD manufacturers that the current unit of measure change would pay excellent long-term returns (lawsuits notwithstanding).


RE: Excellent Settlement
By tmouse on 10/24/2007 2:25:15 PM , Rating: 2
I have to agree with justin on what I believe his point is: namely the computer industry should have never taken the prefixes mega, giga ect.. which are base 10 prefixes (established LONG before computers were ever dreamed of) and attached them to base 2 units. ALL other fields of science use base 10 and the public is(in general )only familiar with base 10 so it is the computer industry's mistake which has caused this confusion. This is what the SI was trying to avoid. They should have just made up their own prefixes if they needed to stay with base 2. This is VERY much like having Kiloinches or Gigayards.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By CascadingDarkness on 10/24/2007 5:26:24 PM , Rating: 2
Just one thing to point out. I bought 6 Barracuda's OEM and they were not marked 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Hard drive labels are small.

I'm not mad, this refund is more of a bonus, because I love my Barracuda's. I know with OEM you don't expect all documentation, but it's cases like this that likely pushed Seagate to refund, since not everyone was informed of this.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By rcsinfo on 10/24/2007 2:19:47 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
I agree, however, if the facts were on their side, they probably wouldn't be so worried about a drawn-out legal battle.


I'm not sure that having the facts on your side is enough in today's legal climate. A skilled class action lawyer builds a sense of outrage to go with the case. This is not only to influence the jury, but to drag the defendant's name through the mud throughout the trial. I'm sure Seagate looked at the marketing implications of trial vs. settlement as well.


RE: Excellent Settlement
By Nik00117 on 10/24/2007 3:27:52 AM , Rating: 2
Yes, However I just made myself a nice little profit.

I am a system builder 90% of my HDDs in the last 3 years that i've been open for shop are seagate, and I have all the records for every HDD theres quite a few of them :)


Got to be kidding
By Jypster on 10/23/2007 8:35:58 PM , Rating: 2
Guess as more cluseless people own computers we are going to see more rot like this taking up courts. Great now the company will jack up prices to cover losses. GB and GiB .. give me a break and people should try to learn something about the tools they use. Hmm time to sue all HD makers ? How about gameconsoles that are advertised as 80 gb where they really aren't.

Yikes just had a thought, my car takes 74.3 litres in a tank not the 75 on the spec sheet. Right time to talk to my laywer ! ( or clean the gunk out of the bottom <grins> )

oh well.




RE: Got to be kidding
By TomZ on 10/23/07, Rating: 0
RE: Got to be kidding
By drebo on 10/23/2007 9:06:58 PM , Rating: 2
I've never seen a hard drive that advertised holding GiB (2^32) increments of storage.

On every drive you buy, there's a disclaimer that says "1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes". Been this way a long time.


RE: Got to be kidding
By Jypster on 10/23/2007 9:12:45 PM , Rating: 1
"Seagate broke the law" I am not disagreeing. I just see it as: The People pay for the courts with taxes. Even if the parties have to pay legal fees the court time has been used on something this trival where as there are long waiting times for way more important stuff.

This method of size reporting has been used for many years. Bit like the veiwable screen v's screen size on CRTs and even some LCDs. Lots of things are advertized or show to have cappicities that are now quiet true hence my fuel tank example. I am sure you yourself could easly list a few other examples, but I must ask is it worth your taxes and your court times on these matters when most people with a clue understand this difference between GiB and GB ?

How many people get done by kilobytes and kilobites per second on their net connection as well ? kbps v's kBps would the average person even see a diff? Do I want my taxes wasted because of their ignorance ?


RE: Got to be kidding
By Jypster on 10/23/2007 9:14:39 PM , Rating: 2
opps it is election time here ia oz, that is probaly why I said tax so many times, sorry about that <grins>


RE: Got to be kidding
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 9:40:38 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
"Seagate broke the law" I am not disagreeing. I just see it as: The People pay for the courts with taxes.

To extend your logic a bit, we could save even more money by enforcing fewer and fewer laws. But what wouldn't that kind of defeat the purpose of the laws in the first place?

False advertising is a pretty important consumer protection. Many of you guys here are willing to throw that out and return to the older system of caveat emptor where consumers regularly got screwed on a constant basis.

After all, as you argue, consumers should know better. How can they know better if they are lied to? That is how advertising used to work in this country.

No thanks, I'd prefer that people selling things be held to some degree of truth and accountability.


RE: Got to be kidding
By Veraiste on 10/29/2007 4:47:25 PM , Rating: 2
They are being held up to truth and accountability. Storage device makers have represented there drives in powers of ten for quite some time now. I've never been confused about what I was purchasing.


RE: Got to be kidding
By Justin Case on 10/23/2007 9:43:25 PM , Rating: 2
They did not break any law and no judge or jury has ever made a decision regarding this. Looks like not only aren't you familiar with the case, but you didn't even bother to RTFA. I suggest reading this paragraph until it sinks in:

quote:
Seagate has denied and continued to deny both the false advertising claims and the fact that it has harmed anyone, and as of yet the courts have not ruled on the merits of the case.


Seagate simply decided that it would be cheaper to make this deal than to pay their own lawyers to argue the case (which they would have won easily; SI magnitude symbols are a well established standard).

In fact, this settlement is virtually free for them, since they're giving away software no one really wants, and very few people will bother to fill out the forms to get the 5% refund.


RE: Got to be kidding
By TomZ on 10/23/2007 10:00:51 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
which they would have won easily; SI magnitude symbols are a well established standard

Then why did Seagate, as well as other HDD manufacturers, not take it through to trial, if the law was so clearly on their side? They would only have to pay their own legal team, and not be exposed to paying the other side legal fees, plus incur all the costs of the settlement, plus the costs due to the slight harm in their reputation?

Also, if everything is so clearly in their favor, why do all HDD manufacturers put disclaimers on the HDD packaging, data sheets, web sites, etc. stating their definition of 1GB?

Sounds like you're bending the truth a lot to support your views.


RE: Got to be kidding
By Justin Case on 10/24/07, Rating: 0
RE: Got to be kidding
By James Holden on 10/24/2007 1:48:10 AM , Rating: 2
It's pretty evident he did.


RE: Got to be kidding
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 2:38:24 PM , Rating: 2
No, Mrs. TomZ, it's pretty evident that he didn't, otherwise he wouldn't be talking about how "the judge decided" that Seagate "broke the law".

It's also pretty obvious that he started out by mixing up GB and GiB, and concluding (wrongly) that Seagate was advertising a wrong size for their drives. After he figured out it was the other way around, he switched his argument to "I'm just saying that GiB isn't a frequently used term", which has nothing to do with the case covered by this DT article.


RE: Got to be kidding
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 2:49:44 PM , Rating: 2
Nice try - yes I made a couple of misstatements in a couple of posts - but I didn't ever switch my argument.

If all else fails, insult others, right Justin?


RE: Got to be kidding
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 3:51:25 PM , Rating: 1
Insult? Mentioning objective facts, that anyone can verify by reading your posts in this thread counts as "insulting"?

If all else fails, pretend you're a victim, right Tom?


RE: Got to be kidding
By TomZ on 10/24/2007 4:00:32 PM , Rating: 2
Well you called Holden "Mrs. TomZ," which was obviously intended as an insult, which is what I was referring to. You also have personal insults scattered throughout your other posts on this thread. If your memory of what you wrote is failing you, simply scroll up and down and find your own posts.


RE: Got to be kidding
By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 4:46:51 PM , Rating: 2
Well, when you (TomZ) consider that calling someone "Mrs. TomZ" is an insult, I can only feel sorry for your (current? future? virtual?) wife.

And calling you "ignorant" isn't an insult; it's merely a statement of fact ("ignorance" simply means "lack of knowledge", which you have displayed several times in this and other threads, despite being compelled to post at a rate that makes some spam bots feel inadequate). So stop trying to play the poor victim (again).

You have over 5 thousand posts in about one year and a half. That's almost ten posts a day, every day. Maybe you should take some time out of your busy posting schedule to actually do some basic research on the subjects you post about...? Just a thought.


RE: Got to be kidding
By just4U on 10/24/2007 10:30:04 PM , Rating: 2
Interesting read, but I can't see myself applying for any rebates even tho I've purchased several seagate drives. Perhaps they are banking on the fact that the masses wont be jumping thru hoops to do that?


RE: Got to be kidding
By TomZ on 10/25/2007 8:19:24 PM , Rating: 2
So you're telling me I'm spending too much time on DT, even though you've clearly spent (wasted?) as much time on this crappy IEC prefix debate as I did? Pretty hypocritical if you ask me.

But if you must know, I do own an engineering company which is doing pretty well at the moment, giving me some extra time to "play" here. I also get some free time after the kids get to bed while my wife is exercising or is at yoga.


By SunAngel on 10/23/2007 9:24:42 PM , Rating: 2
BARE DRIVE PURCHASES AND PRE-INSTALLED HARD DRIVES ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THIS SETTLEMENT!

ONLY RETAIL KITS !




By Justin Case on 10/23/2007 9:47:36 PM , Rating: 2
Single drives bought from distributors (which is most people's definition of an "OEM drive") are included. Drives bought as part of a complete system are not.

http://www.harddrive-settlement.com/notice-long.ht...

quote:
A "Retail Hard Drive" is a Seagate brand hard disc drive that you purchased from an authorized Seagate retailer or distributor, separately as a Seagate product that was not pre-installed into and sold bundled with a personal computer or other electronic device.


By SunAngel on 10/23/2007 10:28:35 PM , Rating: 2
Read the certification section at the bottom of the mail-in claim form.

It clears states you have to certify that the drive information your submitting is from a retail hard (not an OEM or bare bone).


By nitrous9200 on 10/23/2007 10:57:23 PM , Rating: 2
Good, maybe I can make up some of the cost of the e-rebate that CompUSA never gave me!


By Justin Case on 10/24/2007 1:54:18 AM , Rating: 3
I did. It's identical to the online form. Here's what it says:

quote:

Name of retailer or distributor

[...]

I purchased the Retail Hard Drive identified above separately as a Seagate Product.


In other words, all that's required was that it was bought as a separate product, and not as part of a larger device (ex., an assembled PC). The term "retail hard drive" describes all drives sold directly to consumers.

If you are an OEM, then no, you can't return the drive or get a refund, but "OEM drives" (meaning "just a drive in a bag") bought by end users are eligible.

In other words, the information in the DT article above is correct.


By Aikouka on 10/24/2007 10:39:32 AM , Rating: 2
SunAngel, I've always been under the assumption that the term "OEM" can also refer to system builders such as Dell and HP.

I went and read the wikipedia (I know, not the best source, but works as a decent reference) on Original Equipment Manufacturer. Here's a section on contradictory use of OEM in manufacturing:

"When a company purchases products or components from another company and resells the products or components with the purchasing company's name or logo on them (usually, but not always as part of a product), the company that resells the product is called the OEM."

Now whether or not they're actually using this "version" of the term is unknown to me. I'm just putting out there what I know and have heard. If they are, this would refer to when you buy a barebones PC with a Seagate HDD in it or you buy a Dell/HP/Compaq/Whatever with a Seagate HDD in it.


By TomZ on 10/24/2007 10:54:33 AM , Rating: 2
Justin quoted Seagate's definition of "retail" above. It pretty clearly includes any stand-alone drive that you purchase.


Wow...
By AstroCreep on 10/23/2007 8:33:01 PM , Rating: 2
...I didn't even know there was a CA suit against Seagate.
Looks like you're eligible for as many drives as you have purchased (not limited to 'one claim per household') in that time-frame.

I didn't see how much they will pay out per claim; anyone know that?




RE: Wow...
By AstroCreep on 10/23/2007 8:36:40 PM , Rating: 2
Ah, nevermind, I found it:
quote:
...Cash Payment Benefit equal to 5% of the Net Amount Paid.

http://www.harddrive-settlement.com/doc-MailIn.htm


RE: Wow...
By James Holden on 10/23/2007 8:41:39 PM , Rating: 2
lol it was on front page for me


RE: Wow...
By fk49 on 10/23/2007 8:42:50 PM , Rating: 1
That means that for the drive I bought last year, I'll receive a wonderful compensation of...$2.50...

Forget it with these frivolous lawsuits. I didn't have any misconceptions buying this drive and I'm satisfied with its performance thus far.


RE: Wow...
By drebo on 10/23/2007 9:00:15 PM , Rating: 2
Yes, but the company I work for purchases thousands of Seagate drives per year.

That's a lot of money.


RE: Wow...
By FITCamaro on 10/23/2007 9:10:33 PM , Rating: 3
I'm with you man. I've bought 2-3 Seagate drives within that timeframe. I won't be trying to get anything from Seagate. I knew what I was getting.

This lawsuit was nothing but ignorant consumers suing someone because they couldn't read a package and manual.


RE: Wow...
By Oregonian2 on 10/24/2007 2:31:59 PM , Rating: 2
Since 2001 I've probably bought at least a dozen from Seagate including four or five within the last year or two. No way would I put in for it. Too stupid and feeds the vicious selfishness of the folks suing (although I'm still disappointed in Seagate for being such a wimp).