smh.com.au — Western Digital Corp. is offering free software to about 1 million consumers to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that its computer hard drives stored less material than promised; a discrepancy stemming from high-tech's different standards for sizing up digital data.
Jun 28, 2006 View in Crawl 4
boberthepkerJun 28, 2006
This is ridiculous, they way HDD manufacturers measure their capacity makes sense, but because OSs measure it differently is in no way the HDD manufacturers fault. If anything a case like this would hold more water if applied to marketed MPG as compared to real world MPG for new cars.
zapfJun 28, 2006
The OS' fault was only a terminology snafu - Hard drive manufacturers are the one being at most fault by advertising decimal sizes on a binary system.
icanflyJun 28, 2006
Now sue someone over filesystems. They might as well list how much space the formatted drive will hold since if the user isn't aware of how hardrive sizes work then they probably don't understand how filesystems work. I'm suprised ipod users haven't sued apple because their 4gb nano's don't hold 4gb of data.
kabewmJun 29, 2006
"This is ridiculous, they way HDD manufacturers measure their capacity makes sense, but because OSs measure it differently is in no way the HDD manufacturers fault."The tech industry has been measuring data since before hard drives were in computers. The HDD manufacturers used to actually label their drives correctly (not counting formatting) but changed it as gimmick to make their drives look bigger.It's blatent false advertising. The only ones in tech that do this are HDD makers and DVD media makers. Everyone else in this industry is on the same page.
Closed AccountJun 30, 2006
Like most of the nation, you were suckered by completely untrue sensationalist reporting.<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Liebeck">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Liebeck</a>If you spill coffee on yourself, it should not cause third-degree burns on 16% of your body. At 190 degrees, the coffee was extremely dangerous. For comparison, your typical home waterheater is set to a safe MAXIMUM of 125 to 140 degrees. At 190 degrees, you would recieve third-degree burns in as little as just two seconds.