Computer Makers Sued Over Hard-Drive Size Claims
Is this a suit brought about by ignorance or are hard drive mfrs at fault for not revealing 1K = 1024 bytes?
Sounds like the former to me. A gigabyte is defined as 1,073,741,824 bytes, not 1,000,000,000.
If someone sold you a container held one kerflop of liquid, the salesmen said it held one kerflop, but you thought it held one magnut, whose fault it that?
Do auto manufacturers have to define “gallon” and “mile” in order to tout MPG figures?
I think they are being deceptive and relying on the fact that the general public is completely unaware that in computer terms, you’re using numbers that must be even powers of two.
The average person knows what a mile is, and knows what a gallon is, but the average person has no concept of the fact that computers operate on the binary number system, which means that while in the rest of the world, 1 kilo is 1,000, in disk space it’s 1024.
I also think the fact that RAM manufacturers having labeled their products accurately (A 64 MB stick of RAM contains 65536 bytes. You can see this as your computer tests memory during post) is a point against the hard drive manufacturers. If the makers of RAM can be strictly honest, there is no reason the makers of HD’s can’t. I am willing to allow that some HD space is taken up by the boot sector and the file system itself, but it shouldn’t cut well over a gig off of a 20 GB drive.
If you advertise a drive as 20 GB, then it ought to have 21,474,836,480 bytes of storage on it, or not be advertised as 20 GB.
Both of these posts miss the point.
If there are only 18.6 Gigabytes on the disk that the computer can actually read from and write to, then the drive has 18.6 Gigabytes of storage capacity, not 20 Gigabytes.
18.62 Gigabytes is 20,000,000,000 bytes, not 21,474,836,480, and if the device is labeled as having the extra billion bytes of storage, I expect to get them. That’s over 1400 Megs, fer crying out loud.
How exactly did I miss the point?
I said:
I just think the only reason the manufacturers have gotten away with their advertising fib is that they’re relying on the fact that the general public won’t know the difference.
The definition site link I gave has a def for “wordnet dictionary” and “computing dictionary.” The first defines 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, the second as 2^30, or 1,073,741,824.
So I guess the question boils down to, should the “common” defininition be used or the “computing” definition? Unless there is no question that a hard drive is a computing device, I would expect the computing def to be used.
But RAM, which also is solidly in the computing field, is sized using the common def. Go figure. At least RAM manufacturers won’t be sued for giving more than expected.
And. Scotandrsn, whether a 20GB disk has 20,000,000,000 bytes or 21,474,836,480 all depends on what you use for your units. Change your units and a 20GB disk is a diff size. So is the basic 1K unit = 1000 or 1024? That’s the question.
Any consumer who is trying to calculate down to the last byte how many pictures he can store on one drive needs to learn a lot more about computers. Not only do programs, operating systems, etc. take up space on a typical hard drive, but there is significant loss from formatting and allocation schemes as well (that is, if your cluster size is 64K, storing a 3K file will result in 61K of wasted, but unusable space).
Why are they only suing computer manufacturers, instead of the hard drive manufacturers who actually perpetuated the confusing units?
Personally, I’m only half moved by the argument. There’s a long history of confusing units that share the same name: An ounce of gold weighs over 20% more than an ounce of dirt, and a pint of flour is over 16% more volume than a pint of water.
Do you have a cite for this? I’ve always been sure 64 MB of RAM is 65,536 KB, or 67,108,864 bytes. Only persistent storage is commonly measured in decimal units, and this page gives some of the confusing definitions. 1 MB on a floppy and 1 MB on a DVD-R are both different from 1 MB on a CD-R.
I meant to say all three units are different.
1 MB on a DVD-R (or hard drive) = 1,000,000 bytes = 1000 * 1000
1 MB on a floppy = 1,024,000 bytes = 1000 * 1024
1 MB on a CD-R (or RAM) = 1,048,576 bytes = 1024 * 1024
Really?
Then why does my box with 384 MB (one stick 256, one stick 128) of RAM count to 393216 KB when the machine POSTs?
Is that because it’s sized using the ‘common’ definition where 1 MB = 1000 KB?
RAM is accurately sized according to the proper technical standard. Hard disks are not.
I would like to say, in defense of computer manufactors, that almost every computer advertisment I have seen has always noted that, for their harddrives, 1Gig = 1000MBytes. If you don’t read the fine print, then you shouldn’t complain.
I earned the undying hatred of my tenth-grade computers teacher by telling him that a megabyte was 1,048,576 bytes and not 1,000,000 on the first day of classes. (He later ended up giving me my lowest mark in high school after “losing” a few of my assignments…)
I can’t access the NIST website that used to explain this in detail. I think the reason why hard drives are sold with decimal gigabytes is because hard drives (and CDRs and DVDs) are manufactured with decimal gigabytes. A hard drive, out of the factory, has its physical storage area divided into, say, 100 billion bytes, not 107,374,182,400 bytes. Selling it as a 100 GB (decimal gigabytes) hard drive looks better than selling it as a 93.1 GB (binary gigabytes) drive, because the round numbers look nicer =P. I’m not sure of the technical reasons for manufacturing storage media in decimal mega/gigabytes; I think it’s because the storage medium itself is not an electronic device, and it’s somehow easier to make them that way.
RAM, however, is an electronic device, and is manufactured in binary megabytes, so the potentially delusive decimal gigabytes aren’t used in advertising.
Slack space is also potentially deceiving. Each file on a hard drive, regardless of its size, must occupy an integral number of clusters. So, on a drive with a 32 KB cluster size, a file 500 bytes long occupies 32 KB on the drive. 32 KB is the default cluster size on a FAT32 hard drive over 32 GB, which is most of them now. On a large drive with a lot of files, it’s easy to waste 5 or 10% of the potential storage space in slack.
If you install a 64MB RAM chip, and you get 67,108,864 actual bytes, that looks like MORE, not less, doesn’t it? Of course, it’s not really, but I can’t imagine someone suing a RAM manufacturer for this “error.”
But if you install a 20GB hard drive and find only 18.6GB apparent storage available, you might be upset if you don’t understand how those numbers were computed.
I’m not upset at all. I’m happy we can get so much for so little. 
The thing with this is back in the day a 20MB hard drive was really 20MBs. Real MB, not 1,000,000 bytes.
They can’t claim that it was always decimal when they themselves used to use binary.
I would like to say, in defense of computer manufactors, that almost every computer advertisment I have seen has always noted that, for their harddrives, 1Gig = 1000MBytes. If you don’t read the fine print, then you shouldn’t complain.
I have to say I was pretty pissed off when I bought a “200GB” external hard drive and it actually only had 186GB.
I hope they win.
Good call Roches.
Also, the figures given out by most hard drive manufacturers are for the hard drives unformatted capacity. The file system required to randomly access information on a hard drive has it’s own storage space requirements. My 40 gig hard drive actually has a formatted storage capacity of about 37-38 gigabytes for a FAT32 operating system. Your actual mileage may vary, depending on what operating system/file system (if any) you choose to install.
Right, Nutwrench, we have formatting, FAT overhead, cluster overhead, and probably space taken up by other non-data files in a typical system. So anyone that takes a size spec and expects to calculate to the fraction of a byte exactly how many pictures they can store is pretty much wasting their time.
And it sounds to me that this is the kind of person that is behind the suit.
Personally, I have never even come close to filling up a hard drive. And I have 120 Gigs at home, just sitting nearly empty. I don’t imagine that I could ever use all of them.
Those of you who fill up your 200 Gig hard drives with MP3s need to just relax. And fer chrissake, if you’re complaining about a measly couple of gigs on a 20 G drive, then buddy, you must have way too much spare time.
“But you’re missing the point. It’s about honesty.”
Oh, please. I know when I’m buying anything computer-related, be it CPU, RAM, hard drive, whatever, that it’s an approximate number.
You know that fancy Pentium 4 with the 800 Mhz front side bus that you just bought? Well, guess what: The bus speed fluctuates slightly during operation. Oh no! Call my lawyer! I was sold a 3.02 GHz processor that’s operating at only 3.01 GHz.
Shuddup already.
Yes, they are deceptive. Manufacturers could have said for years that fromatting would use up 5-10% of the maximum possible space.
This is common thruout the electronics industry. Tell the customer some theoretical maximum under ideal conditions. One of the worst cases I know of was in hi-fi in the 70’s. Manufacturers would rate the power of their amplifier circuits driven by a power supply that was not built into the amp. The circuit could handle that much power but not deliver it in what you were buying.
caveate emptor, sucker.
The IBM AT came at 6 MHz though the Intel chip could do 8 MHz. I upgraded machines to 9 MHz. IBM changed the BIOS to test the speed and stop the machines if they were running faster than 6. Spye Technoly made a device with a time delay to pass the test and increase the speed afterwards.
About hard drives though. If you type 80 words per minute, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, it takes 10 YEARS to type ONE GIGABYTE. Why worry about this now?
Dal Timgar
Every drive I have bought states clearly the capacity in no uncertain terms. . . if you can understand what you are reading. If you can’t understand it then it ain’t anyone else’s fault. They may be playing with appearances but so do many other products.
As has been said, in a 40 MB drive you cannot fit 40 MB worth of files because the system needs part of the drive for housekeeping information. Should the manufacturers explain that too?
It would be good if the industry would standardise the meaning of MB and GB but as long as they don’t then you just need to know how to look for the information. As long as all hard drives use the same way of counting I do not see the problem.