“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,” The Associated Press reports.
“Under the settlement announced Tuesday, Western Digital will give away software designed to back up and recover computer files to anyone who bought one of the company’s disk drives from March 22, 2001, through Feb. 15 of this year,” AP reports.
“Besides buying the software for consumers, Western Digital has agreed to pay $500,000 in fees and expenses to San Francisco lawyers Adam Gutride and Seth Safier, who filed the suit last year. The proposed legal fees still require court approval,” AP reports. “Lake Forest, Calif.-based Western Digital believes the suit’s allegations are unfounded, but decided to settle to avoid a potentially expensive legal battle, said company spokesman Steve Shattuck.”
“The dispute over hard-drive capacity illuminates the contradictory methods for measuring the bits and bytes that devour a computer’s memory,” AP reports. “Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc., which make the operating systems for most personal computers, use a binary system to measure kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes while most disk drive manufacturers like Western Digital derive their calculations from the more-familiar decimal system.”
“The difference can add up to a substantial gap between what’s promised on a hard drive’s packaging and what gets stored on a personal computer,” AP reports. “The lawsuit against Western Digital alleged the company’s 80-gigabyte hard drive had an actual capacity of 74.4 gigabytes. If not for that 7 percent shortfall, the buyer could have stored an additional 80 hours of digital music or 5,600 digital pictures, the suit claimed.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: America, “The Land Of Opportunity.”
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This has absolutely nothing to do with Macs, does it? I thought Apple used Maxtor, Toshiba, and Fujitsu drives.
But thats how all harddrives are!?!?! Why does WD get blamed for it…??
Actually, Macbooks use Seagate !!! YAY!!
I presume MDN’s snide little take is a slam on lawsuits. I’m not a fan of litigation either, but one major reason we have so much is the lack of regulation in this country. European countries tend to regulate more heavily and in return protect businesses from lawsuits as long as they follow the regs.
I’m not saying the European system is better, but you gotta have one or the other, regulation or lawsuits. Limiting lawsuits without increasing regulation just gives business free reign to do whatever the hell they want.
Jon,
It has to do with Macs if you’re using a WD drive, (as I am).
LordRobin,
Sadly your not too far off – Less responsibility leads to the need for more regulation, which leads to less freedom, which leads to fewer choices… That goes for consumers and manufacturers/resellers.
I bet the free software does not work on a Mac and it’s probably crap, as well as the lawyers.
When the SI system was established, long before computing was even invented, the meanings of the prefixes “kilo” and “mega” and “giga” were all clearly defined. There should never have been any confusion regarding this issue.
ROM and RAM chips, though not hard drives, are always manufactured to binary capacities for engineering reasons. Early programmers got used to thinking in terms of binary kilobits way back when systems had like 64 kilobits of RAM and the difference between the binary unit and the SI unit came down to a few hundred bytes.
Mass storage was introduced much later, and it was a huge mistake to continue counting in the non-standard binary kilobits, as binary capacities mean basically nothing to a magnetic medium. Today some programmers (like the maintainers of Linux) are trying to correct the mistake and use new terms like kibibits and mebibits for the binary versions, leaving kilo and mega with the definitions that they have had for hundreds of years.
Given that my Western Digital external HD came with “free backup software” (yes, for Mac as well) this “settlement” is hardly going to be benifiting me!
MDN’s take should be “America, land of lawyers”. The law firm who filed the lawsuit (without even owning a Western Digital hard drive!) will get $500,000 for it.
This is an old problem.
There really should be a REAL MEASURE of what a HD will hold. I’m aware that different drive formats yeild differnt capicity, yet still there should be a way.. some type of standard that will let consumers know exactly how much data they can store on a drive.
After all, you wouldn’t buy a “four bedroom house” and be happy with only 3 bedrooms, would you?
Then why should you be happy buying an “80 Gig” HD, only to find it it holds less than 75 gigs?
Jeffrey, it’s your OS lying to you; the drive really has 80 gigs and your OS calls it 75.
A “gig” is a billion. Your 80 gig drive has 80 billion bytes. Calling it 75 billion confuses the issue and there has never been a technical reason for your OS to tell you that 80 billion is 75 billion.
There is no reason for your OS to use a different definition of billion, but it does.
I suppose this means that we can expect similar lawsuits now for the makers of all other hard drives.
On a side note, I have a 120 GB Western Digital Caviar drive in my Quicksilver. What now? I have an obligation now to fill these lawyers’ pockets with cash I suppose…
MW: Taking. Like taking candy from a baby
I have 4 Western Digital drives in my Mac. And yes, the settlement specifies that they must offer software compatible with 10.1.5 or greater.
However, I don’t think I have much need for the software and think it’s a bad settlement deal since the lawyers are getting half a million and the class is getting something that is essentially free to Western Digital (it costs them very little in bandwidth and opportunity costs but they make up for it in promotion/upgrades).
On the other hand, they did use the standard unit of measurement. When I bought their drives, I knew exactly what I was getting, that is a drive of size X wherein X costs Y as compared to drives A, B, C.
I know of no one who add up all the bits of their files and then spec an exact capacity. I sure never have.
I recently bought a new hard drive and before it was formatted, the capacity reported correctly in OSX. LaCie actually point out on their drives that the advertised capacity is before formatting.
America, “The Land Of Oppornudity.”
Western Digital exaggerated the size of their hard drive.
Stupidest settlement I’ve heard. The lawyers as usual get their money – after approval. You get free useless software.
Ok. I buy a WD HD and the sizing is wrong. I can’t store as much as I thought I could or was told that I could. WD gives me FREE software to backup my HD as part of their settlement.? WTF.? Shouldn’t I get money for the missing HD space that I bought but don’t get to use. I already have back up software. I don’t see the purpose of the free software.
Besides EVERY boxed HD I’ve ever purchase has come with some sort of useless backup software – for the PC.
What genius figured that settlement out. Oh yeah, a Lawyer AND a Judge AND the HD manufacturer.
I’m not advocating the lawsuit but come on.
Remember when MS wanted to give away Free software as part of their settlement? Steve Jobs said it was like letting them print money.
Kill all the lawyers…
This is maybe the dumbest lawsuit I have ever seen.
Should I now sue because my Mac claims to have 1GB of memory, but I can only use 890MB?
Jackass lawyers crooks criminals!
Wow, 7%… frankly, if i only had 7% i’d run out and buy another drive rather than sue because I didn’t have that additional space. i hope everybody involved in the suit has a nasty hard-drive crash where they lose ALL their important data on their life.