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A group of computer owners has filed a lawsuit against some of the world's biggest makers of personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives.
to read more about it http://news.com.com/2100-1015_3-5078961.html
For some reason i knew this would happen sooner or later. Everyone is going lawsuit crazy right now.
PeacE
-BoB
ahhh.. so we can now sue over inconsistencies in how we measure bits and bytes ?
*sigh.. yeah.. i guess the "educated" lawfolk haven't consulted much with the real world technical types..
Gosh.. People are too darn lazy to contact the manufactorer themselves :D
Pictures.. Lol (Please excuse sick mind ;) )Quote:
That missing 10 GB, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.
OMG.. do you mean I've been lied to all these years.. And the information been correct.. I could still have some of my hi-grade p0rn.. oh woe is me....
In this case AMD may need to watch their backs.. ..
these "educated" are most likley the ones who were also screaming "the end of the world" for y2k.. That is why no one sued for the crap in 1999.. ..Quote:
*sigh.. yeah.. i guess the "educated" lawfolk haven't consulted much with the real world technical types..
To be honest I am sick of explaining why the difference to customers.. perhaps the manufacturers could just put both the decimal size and the hexadecimal size on the hdd's then let the silly buggers work it out for themselves..
This weeks Customer Story
CheersQuote:
Customer comes in this week concerned that she was rapidly filling here HDD, and wanted to get some of her older files off the drive to make room for the new files..
und3rtak3r: You can use your CD-RW drive to 'Backup your older data.. as a matter of fact it is a good idea to keep backups of your data just incase something happens to your HDD.. like a virus or a power surge kills the machine
Customer: OK How many CD's would I need to backup ALL the Data on my Hard drive..
und3rtak3r: How much Data have you got on your Hdd?
Customer: I don't know, but it must be getting near full .. it is a 80gb drive and I have over 2000 letters and about 200 songs.. and 6 months of emails from the kids.
BTW: total disk usage was 4.8Gb, with her data being only 1250Mb
They have got a point though.
dunno what the point is.. The difference has always been there..
unfortunatly many ppl just don't want to think.. there has always been two ways to measure the size of a hdd, dec and hex.. these buggers are to darn lazy to pick up a book and learn something.. or at least to RTFM ( Ask questions) and find out why the difference..
The next thing and they should have done this years ago.. how about your 17" CRT monitor.. is it 17" think of how much bigger the pictures can be if the screen size was correct.as advertised.. shame realy.. most monitors now are LCD...
.. sound to much like someones gunner get richer and I ain't talking about the plaintifs or the Computer manufacturers..
Oh yeh.. Who has ever used the FULL capacity of their "Boot HDD" I mean the full 20GB dec of a 20Gdec HDD.. ? and still have a smooth running system? except for you linux users..
Perhaps these same ppl may need to sue Misrocoft for the bloat ware.. they could easily get en extra 1 to 1.gGB on there HDD's with WInXP if it wasn't for the bloat.. and not to forget the lost bytes on a hdd due to the slack in the NTFS and FAT filesystems.. ..think how many more 1k files could fit on a hdd..
Oh gee and for that matter.. how about the file overhead in small ZIP files.. and in Jpeg and GIF files.. ...nah now I am getting silly..
Closing.. gee they will complain when we get to 150Tb dec.. HDD's.. won't they.. gee how many more hours of Home video will that be.. or will it be hours of PVR time for "Days of our lives" backup..
Cheers
I have a different view on hard drives, it is not just the claimed capacity, but how long the manufacturer's warranty runs? It used to be 3 years standard. Now a lot are only one?
I am more into RAID these days, as the MoBos are now affordable :) RAID0 (striped) gives you fast performance and dangerous exposure, but I usually go for RAID1 (Mirrored). The beauty of a mirrored system is that you get total duplication, so if one drive goes, you are still in business for a while, and lose nothing. Useful for non-computer types writing PhD Theses and such?
Just a thought........................BTW liked the customer service story :D
nihil > I have always bought western digital, most likely always will. Western Digital drives still come with a 3 year warranty in which they will replace a defective, faulty, or non-functioning drive. Within the first 30 days, they even offer free tech support on setting up the drive and installing 'stuff' onto it. I just bought another one of those 200GB 8MB Cache 7200RPM Western Digital drives, and it still has a 3 year replacement warranty.
As for this lawsuit, I really don't see the case. I bought a 200GB hard disk drive, it has 1,600,000,000,000 bits on it. That is how it is advertised, and that is what I bought. The fact that the customer does not know what they are doing does not change the size of the disk. Most operating systems do work under a binary base two system in which the SI system is in increments of 1,024 instead of 1,000, but this does not change the physical size of the drive. Just because in windows the size of the drive may be reported as 186.264514923095703125GB, does not change the fact that the drive still holds 1.6 trillion bits.
How it is false advertising to report the accurate size of the drive is beyond me.
{
By the way, if the operating system could display it, one yottabye would be 0.000 000 000 000 16543612251060553497428173841399 yottabytes in the same 200GB HDD. 200GB should be 0.000 000 000 000 2 yottabytes. This would make the differences in the base of 1,000 and 1,024 systems be even more apparent. So if they are somehow successful in there claim, I want another 35 gigabytes for every one of my 200GB disks I have now.
}
I guess they are trying to enjoy the american pastime of suing other people. Very whiney people though. They are basically suing someone for not educating themselves.Quote:
Originally posted here by DeadAddict
A group of computer owners has filed a lawsuit against some of the world's biggest makers of personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives.
to read more about it http://news.com.com/2100-1015_3-5078961.html
KOntrol...........you are talking sense...they will have you for contempt of court?
I have several western digital drives myself, and never had any problems. I think it is all legal mania? If you have ENOUGH space, isn't that OK?........it is not like a gallon of gas?
If I were the judge, I would require the plaintiffs to show me what USEFUL information they would put in the extra space.................or the contempt fine would equal several terrabytes :D
Cheers
You know K0ntrole,Quote:
By the way, if the operating system could display it, one yottabye would be 0.000 000 000 000 16543612251060553497428173841399 yottabytes in the same 200GB HDD. 200GB should be 0.000 000 000 000 2 yottabytes. This would make the differences in the base of 1,000 and 1,024 systems be even more apparent. So if they are somehow successful in there claim, I want another 35 gigabytes for every one of my 200GB disks I have no
I was looking for an analogy for the HDD size issue.. and you just gave me an Idea.. I have looked for a way of easily explaining it for years and it was on my desk all along..
A ruler.. For years we could get the common ¨foot" ruler with inches marked on oneside, and Centimetres on the other. The fact that one side was marked as 12 inch and the other is 30cm. These could be sold as 30cm rulers. Would this be misleading? The ruler is still the same length isnṫ it? It is just two methods of measurement using two different units of mesurement.
As for warranty length... ALL the manufacturers are shipping the HDDś with 1 year warranty in Australia.. BUt then 10% of the failures I have seen are in the first year of use 85% are in drives over 3 years the other 5% (total of 2 drives) died in the second and third year.. By reducing the warranty the manufacturers are able to reduce their costs.. the Warranty is an insurance policy, either they pay an insurance company M$ or they hold a certain percentage of their stock for warranty replacement.. This all costs money.. money that could be sitting in their coffers, helping them build bigger and better HDDś.
Oh and cheaper Hard drives.. or fighting stupid law suites from people who are reading the wrong side of the ruler and thinking the ruler should be longer..
Cheers
We should just move all computer products to a binary prefix system. Gibi-byte= 2^30
As far as I am concerned a 20gB drive holds 20gB of data. Some of that data is invisible to the user as it is actually formatting data the OS uses. A certain amount of drive capacity has always been lost to formatting. It has always been so and always will be.
If you perform the calculations using the number of heads, cylinders, tracks, sectors you can calculate the actual capacity of a drive in bytes. When was the last time anyone actually saw how many heads, etc their new drive has?
Stuart
I think we have had some good "newbie" input here....seabass55...very subtle :) stuart...very sensible.
At the end of the day, I think that the question is how many $, not how many bytes?
Just my cynical £0.02
Just 4d sake of one more needless comment this case has begun mebbe a new era of 'windows' 2 cheat r hardware manufacturers & is good 4 people who do not have much 2 do