(Hard Drive) Size Does Matter

Red-DawnRed-Dawn Been kidnapped and being held hostage in Edinburgh
edited September 2003 in Science & Tech
This has always been a questionable aspect of hard drives and there capacity listings. It's about time someone forced companies to re-evaluate the way the advertise hard drive specs.
LOS ANGELES -- 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.

The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed earlier this week in Los Angeles Superior Court against Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba

According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.

The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 GB would actually have only 18.6 GB of readable capacity, the lawsuit said

The full report:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60505,00.html

Post edited and comments added by Spinner. Thanks also to TD_Isles for the heads up on this news aswell.

Comments

  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited September 2003
    Its about time someone did something about the deceptive trade practice. They should have always listed drive sizes in binary format and not decimal.

    Decimal format makes people think they are getting more space than they really are.
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