OT: Actuale size vs advertised size of HDs

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skeeter

Recently Western Digital was sued (class action suit) because the
advetised size of their hard drives was not the amount of space that
was actually availabe to the user. They lost. This is also true of
hard drives by other manufactures. And especially of CD-Rs and CR-RWs.
I suspect the same is also true of DVDs. Why haven't they been sued
for mis-representing the size of their products also? Just curious.

Walt
 
Recently Western Digital was sued (class action suit) because the
advetised size of their hard drives was not the amount of space that
was actually availabe to the user. They lost. This is also true of
hard drives by other manufactures. And especially of CD-Rs and CR-RWs.
I suspect the same is also true of DVDs. Why haven't they been sued
for mis-representing the size of their products also? Just curious.

Walt
Click to expand...

Because the standards are not being followed.
When a mechanical (whatever) engineer draws a blueprint.
it can be read no matter what the native language of the
designer.
 
Recently Western Digital was sued (class action suit) because the
advetised size of their hard drives was not the amount of space that
was actually availabe to the user. They lost. This is also true of
hard drives by other manufactures. And especially of CD-Rs and CR-RWs.
I suspect the same is also true of DVDs. Why haven't they been sued
for mis-representing the size of their products also? Just curious.

Walt
Click to expand...

Because the standards are not being followed.
When a mechanical (whatever) engineer draws a blueprint.
it can be read no matter what the native language of the
designer.

Actually, Western Digital was punished for being technically correct. An 80 GB drive held
80,000,000 bytes of information. The fact that the computer reported 74 GB because it used the base
2 definition and the marketing used the metric definition, was not the fault of WD, but rather the
differences between the metric system and computer math. By the way, only the vulture lawyers got
any money out of that law suit.
 
Nominal disk size

Binary vs. Decimal Measurements
http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec.htm

Open My Computer | Right click a hard drive | Click Properties |
Look at the Used space and Free space.
Notice anything?


CD Capacity

How much data can they hold? 650MB? 680MB?
http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq07.html#S7-6

CD-R Media List - Sorted by CD-R Capacity
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_cdr_info_fs.shtml

CD Media World - CD-RW Recordable Media Info Table
Click on...
CD-RW Info Table - Sorted by Total Space
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_cdrw_info.shtml

--
Hope this helps. Let us know.

Wes
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User

In
 
Actually, Western Digital was punished for being technically correct. An 80 GB drive held
80,000,000 bytes of information. The fact that the computer reported 74 GB because it used the base
2 definition and the marketing used the metric definition, was not the fault of WD, but rather the
differences between the metric system and computer math. By the way, only the vulture lawyers got
any money out of that law suit.
Click to expand...


Oh get real. Hard drive manufacturers have been lying to consumers
for years about the size of their drives. Its about time one of them
got taken to task for it.

You obviously don't know the real defenition of a gigabyte.

A gigabyte in computer terms is

1,073,741,824 bytes (2 raised to the 30th power)

Not
1,000,000,000 bytes
 
Booker said:
Oh get real. Hard drive manufacturers have been lying to consumers
for years about the size of their drives. Its about time one of them
got taken to task for it.

You obviously don't know the real defenition of a gigabyte.

A gigabyte in computer terms is

1,073,741,824 bytes (2 raised to the 30th power)

Not
1,000,000,000 bytes
Click to expand...

or perhaps the computer world doesn't know the real (Maths) definition
of Gigabyte?

but I agree with you 'cos
the computer world has a good reason, and HDD manufacturers are part
of the computer world.

If they want to produce and market an 80GB drive, they really should be
85.8 thousand million bytes. (80*1.024*1.048576). hmm I think i'll
stick to 2^n for any power above MB - above 2^20!
(what is a MB? 1024KB or 1,048,576 bytes - I once gave the latter
answer in response to a lecturer- his eyes widened)

They could make hard drives a tiny fraction bigger thus conforming to
the conventions of the computer world and avoiding being dishonest. And
if customer satisfaction is of any importance to them, they should do
that, since uneducated customers will be disappointed when their
operating system tells them it's less than the advertised amount.
 
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