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When is a gigabyte not a gigabyte?
Anyone who knows anything about hard drives knows about the great storage space swindle. It might say 400GB on the front of your disk, but you know damn well that you’ll only be able to use 372.1GB of that by the time it’s been formatted by your OS. We might accept this over here, but in America Creative has just agreed to compensate seven years’ worth of MP3 player customers who didn’t get as much storage capacity as they expected.
The case concerned Creative’s ‘use of the decimal definition of the storage capacity term “gigabyte” (or GB), whereby 1 GB = 109 (1 billion) bytes,’ which the plaintiffs said ‘misleads consumers because certain computer operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition of GB, whereby 1 GB = 230 (1,073,741,824) bytes.’ According to the case against Creative, this means that customers were getting 7 per cent less storage space than advertised.
Creative maintains that this isn’t an issue, saying that it’s ‘denied and continues to deny each and all of plaintiffs’ claims, and denies that anyone has been harmed or deserves compensation.’ However, the company has agreed to an incredible out-of court settlement that offers 50 per cent off a 1GB MP3 player to anyone who bought a Creative MP3 player between 5 May 2001 and 30 April 2008. Alternatively, they can also get 20 per cent off any single item from www.us.creative.com. In return, by taking Creative up on this offer, you agree not to sue the company.
Unfortunately for us, the offer is only open to customers who purchased a player in the US, as that’s where the court settlement took place. However, it’s interesting to see a serious result coming from the way in which hard drive storage is represented. Is it right to sue a company over the different ways in which a gigabyte is rounded up, or is it just down to ignorance? Let us know your thoughts.
Yes it is misleading to anyone who isn't aware of the different classifications of a gig, but at the same time anyone who does sue a company just because of 7% loss of storage space, and is successful, is going to get something for nothing, and something they don't deserve. If anything, 7% of the cost of the hardware should be refunded, and no more. Creative are compensating anyone who bought their products 50%, and if they thought it would lose them more than a hell of a lot of court cases, they wouldn't do it. For some reason, compensation seems to pay out a lot more than it deserves, and everyone in the US, and increasingly over here, seems to go nuts at the idea of easy money :(
It's not pathetic to raise an issue within the industry or sue when you are not getting your values worth of storage or service 'cause the IT Sector can't get themselves together to work out a standard. If you were to get half a pint for paying a pint's worth of beer you'd be quite rightly miffed and protest to the landlord. As users and people who work in the industry in the UK we just don't complain enough so we get rubbish service for it. We complain till we are red faced in bloggs but do bugger all about it!
a kilo-something should always be 1,000 somethings and a giga-something always 1,000,000 somethings. The computer industry decided to use the more binary-friendly 1024 for a kilo, but really it shouldn't have. The only solution I see is to abandon the decimal system altogether, adopting the binary system for everyday life. It would make maths at school very easy. I mean, who can't count to 1? Seriously, though, HDD makers are a part of the computer industry AND dealing in binary figures, so they should use the computer norm 1024. Cheeky Beggers.
I don't care *which* definition the industry (in which I include both hard drive manufacturers and software companies) uses, as long as they only use one. Two definitions do nothing but create confusion and unfairly benefit manufacturers at the expense of customers. It is an unnecessary complication which storage purchasers should not have to waste time finding out about (Lord knows there are already enough necessary complications!) In reply to reashlin, I don't see how hard drive (or software) manufacturers gradually changing from one definition to another would ensure that three standards would exist...?
the early days of computing, when we had 200meg drives etc. The loss of space was negligible so consumers didn't worry. As drives get bigger and bigger the gap is becoming a lot more noticeable. Personally I think manufacturers should come inline with the proper definition of a gigabyte = 1024 megs and increase the space so that when formatted down it becomes a REAL gig.
Hmmmm.. i had never noticed that before, ill have to check that out... but im not bothered because back then i didn't know what a megabyte was lol...and i could still play my games at least... i wouldn't mind to see sony take a little beating from the consumer though lol... and maybe that'll remind the manufacturers to stop pissng us about... especially dont mess with us CPC fans lol
the reason i say this, is because with the Playstation 1 memory cards they were sold as 1 Meg, which people thought where 1 MB but when the PS2 came out and you inserted the PS1 memory cards into a PS2 it came up as a 128KB storage meaning a 1megabit. and all those 8Meg memory cards for the PS1 where really a 1Megabyte card.
...and now we see that HDD manufacturer's have got us accepting less hdd space - and that not only is it ok - it's wrong for us to ask for what they're advertising. They've made us change the definitions! The decmial system is great, but *doesn't* apply to computer memory - or infact pretty much anything in computing, and although most people don't mind the difference it is 100% misleading as we quote game installs and os installs in real GiB and hdd capacities in this crap the hdd manufacturers came out with. Should everybody just learn the difference and how to convert between them - or should hdd manufacturers actually start giving us what they advertise? As size's go up the difference is just going to get bigger and bigger.
Didnt they just make a bigger hard drive with that 1/3 on top of 'x' amounts of GB and solve this issue?
Didnt they just make a bigger hard drive with that 1/3 on top of 'x' amounts of GB and solve this issue?
Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera. These are all prefixes defined clearly by the decimal system. 1Gb = 1,000,000,000 bytes. 1Gib = 2^30 bytes.
quoting reashlin..."Someone here has said how there shouldn't be two measuring systems. Well unless you can get every storage manufacturer to turn around over night you are actually ensuring three standards will exist." well the acoustic industry has been doing this for years (pmpo/rms/max power measurements for watts) so why cant the storage industry do the same. and again......"Just because the average shmo is too naive to realise this happens does not mean the corporations are in the wrong." the average shmo probably accounts for im guessing 95% of the storage purchasing community so the average shmo could do with being informed. the public buys products initially based on the advert/packaging information. How happy would you be if you bought a 4 finger kit kat only to find there were only 3 fingers in the packet :)
as more and more people grow their storage requirements the next thing to be discussed will the terabyte issue i beleive hard drive manufacturers will use 10^12 as the terabyte marker whereas the mathermatical terabyte marke is 2^40 or 1,099,511,627,776. this has come from a historical misuse of the kilo and mega to make memory sizes more understandable to the general public. remember back in the eighties we had the arguements between sinclair spectrum owners and commodre 64 owners over who had the most memory in their machines but the both had exactly the same amount of main memory
TBH im not bothered either, BUT, it would be nice when you buy a 1TB HDD to see it saying you have 1TB of Space lol, i might leave out buying a 1TB HDD for the moment though, because i think that this may cause the Americans to start sueing if an HDD doesn't say in windows what it says on the box, and that may mean that extra bit more HDD Space... What!!... well its always great to have a bit extra :D...MMMmmm... maybe i'll put me porno there... Oh no, am i thinking out loud again... tutt...
TBH I don't much care that I am losing 7% of my quoted space to formatting. And yeah the argument may be that on a 1TB drive your now losing 70GB. But who gives a Sh**. You've still got another 930GB left. Which pretty nicely rounds to 1TB in marketing talk anyway. Like has been said (why is my 1.6 litre car actually 1598cc thats not fair). Yeah OK its a bit of marketing flurry but I dont really see how HDD manufactureres saving 7% of the drive is really a big enough issue to them to force them to "decieve" people. I think its just come to be accepted that is how storage is measured and so products are comparable. Someone here has said how there shouldn't be two measuring systems. Well unless you can get every storage manufacturer to turn around over night you are actually ensuring three standards will exist. Just because the average shmo is too naive to realise this happens does not mean the corporations are in the wrong.
The problem in question isn't to do with space lost during formatting, it's because the company advertises their sizes as 1GB = 1 billion bytes, whereas your computer uses 1GB = 2^30 bytes (the caret is missing from the article for me). So you aren't losing space, the drive /is/ 1GB big if you use their definition, but Windows doesn't, because it doesn't make sense. It's like an insurance company who defines a month as 28 days, so if you buy 6 months insurance on 1st Jan it'd last until May 17th, not June 1st. The first ever life insurance actually invented this as a reason not to pay out, and I believe what Creative and other companies are doing is just as bad - a scam to save money at the cost of the customer. I think we should use 1GB = 2^30 B and nothing else.
There should not be two definitions of 'gigabyte', one used by hard drive manufacturers and the other by everyone else! It is (obviously) only used to deceive people into thinking they're getting more storage space than they are. I'm sure that it is not neccessry or practical for hard drive manufacturers to compensate anybody who has ever bought a hard drive, but I think suing them is a legitimate tactic to try and force them to change their practices.
There should not be two definitions of 'gigabyte', one used by hard drive manufacturers and the other by everyone else! It is (obviously) only used to deceive people into thinking they're getting more storage space than they are. I'm sure that it is not neccessry or practical for hard drive manufacturers to compensate anybody who has ever bought a hard drive, but I think suing them is a legitimate tactic to try and force them to change their practices.
A solution for manufacturers could be for them to make the actual capacities larger so that once formatted they are capable of storing the advertised space? eg a 1TB drive would become 1.075TB (1tb is 93% of this - 7% loss) so once formatted it would be 1TB, or a 80GB would become 86GB etc
A solution for manufacturers could be for them to make the actual capacities larger so that once formatted they are capable of storing the advertised space? eg a 1TB drive would become 1.075TB (1tb is 93% of this - 7% loss) so once formatted it would be 1TB, or a 80GB would become 86GB etc
when i bought my 750Gb sammy drive "knew' that i would be getting about 700Gb so i have nothing to complain for. its like "i'm going to sue Ford becuase my car is a 1.6 but its actually 1598cc". ok so many people don't understand that the way hard drives sizes decrease once formatted by the windows OS so i can agree its not right but suing to me is just so pathetic unless its something life threatening. oh i want to keep the product and make money off them because i can't fit an extra 8 songs on my ipod shuffle or what ever.
I think Dabs still have my order logged for my 10gb Creative Jukebox 3 that I got in 2001. Here's hoping! ;) Does seem a bit odd. Hard drives themselves have been around much longer and as Ben Says you never get 100% of the advertised space but we've come to accept it. Surely Apple will be next in there sights?
Because this whole incident of just a normal young lad (Daniel K/DK) getting in trouble with them, just for Improving on their Drivers, which was daft in my opinion, plus i think the better option would have just been to employ him instead. While on that subject, i wonder what has happend to DK, I hope he is now working for Asus, improving their Drivers, maybe we'll get chance to use decent sound cards one day if so.
manufacturer did the same thing, I think it was Seagate. It offered compensation to customers (only to those in US of course).
benji182, NotFred... Do you guys think it is right that we, the consumer should lose out to the manufacturers because they use a different numbering system to what the actual devices that they are making do? At the moment we are only losing 70GB per 1TB, but with storage capacities on ever bigger jumps, how long will it be before we are losing 100's of GB's on everything digital? - mr_nips... I don't see how you can blame OS designers. They program software and have nothing to do with the way manufacturers number their devices. As for the general 'Are American's ignorant?' question... I think the better question to ask is why we Brits are so keen to just accept raw deal after raw deal and then go and complain in the corner... It's time to stand up and shout out that this is not the way it should be.
As this is a computing arguement, I think devices should be measured in binary amounts as that is how everything works within computing. I have always been left feeling 'done over' by the manufacturers by their use of this numerical loop hole and also think that it is high time that something is done to bring about a change. My questions about this court case though are, 1) Will this spread to other manufacturer? as they all use the same decimal system to calculate storage capacity. 2) Will this legal arguement spread across the water to Europe?
Do they not teach maths over there? I suppose they don't have scan to explain it in the states http://www.scan.co.uk/tekspek/view.asp?a=22&p=1 If it's anyones fault its HDD manufacturers and OS designers. Nice to see creative being slightly generous for a change.
Is this the American public suing Creative because they are ignorant of the way storage is measured? Creative quoted the space in the same way all hard disks do... Topical though it is to hate Creative right now, I wish they hadn't caved in.
this sort of thing really annoys me, and the UK is becoming more and more like the US where the only answer is to sue someone else and most of the time its something pathetic.
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