Com-Central.net

HARD DRIVE maker Western Digital is giving away free software to a million customers that can back up and recover computer files.
The free software will be given to anyone who bought one of the company's disk drives from 22 March 2001, through 15 February 2006. It is part of a deal to end a class action that alleges that Western Digital told porkies to punters about how much data its computer hard drives could store.

The case said that the difference meant that Western Digital's 80-gigabyte hard drive had an actual capacity of 74.4 gigabytes.

Western Digital denies any wrong doing and says that it was using different standards for sizing up digital data. The deal is just to avoid an even more expensive law suit.

Microsoft and Apple 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 work out theirs from a decimal system.

One of the big winners of the court case are San Francisco lawyers Adam Gutride and Seth Safier who bought the case. Western Digital has agreed to pay them $500,000 in fees and expenses.

To get the software, the eligible consumers must register their claims before July 16 here. More here.