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Shades

I posted this here as it's the result of WD mis-reporting how much capacity their drives actually store.
Anyway...,

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.

Reported in The Inquirer today.

tomclayton · ***Power User*** Offline Joined: Mar 19, 2006 Posts: 186

Want to stop frivolous class action siuts? Pass a law that states that if the average plaintiff class member's settlement is less than $100, then the attorneys fees are capped at 10x that average amount! People sueing over 5.6GB??? And a $Ã‚Â½ MILLION payout for the lawyers too??? I'd better get more than some measly backup package! I already know how to zip files and burn a CD for free! If I'm sueing because I only got a 74.4 GB drive when the box said 80, I'd better get the 80GB drive that the box promised!

XcalibeR · ***Power User*** Offline Joined: Mar 11, 2005 Posts: 358

80 Gb to 74.4 Gb? Sounds like a normal NTSF file format size to me. My 120 Gb drive only holds 111.something Gb. I'm not complaining, I was actually expecting it to hold a few Gb less than that when I first bought it.

Guess it all comes down to your definition of a Kilobyte. 1000 bytes, or 1024 bytes?

Shades

Ahhhhhhhh but you didn't sue over it.
Someone did though.
Probably some lawyer.
And some other lawyer agreed he was right and they both talked the judge into awarding damages against.
lolol

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