Western Digital settles hard drive lawsuit

[Payton]

Ok so it's not DIRECTLY webmaster news but interesting nonetheless:

http://www.westerndigital.com/settlement/index.asp

Basically people were complaining that their 120GB drives didn't actually hold 120GB... they just held 120,002,150,400 bytes (111GB). I think it applied to 80GB drives too

 

[Stanley]

It's false advertising, I'm glad they got sued.

 

[kyleirwin]

That's lame, all HD's are like that. If I was any kind of techy geek, I'd be able to tell you why. IIRC it has something to do with the way the drives are formatted. I'm sure somebody will chime in with the technical answer.

 

[Stanley]

It's because there's 1024 bytes per megabyte, not 1000 flat.
Multiply that and you get those odd numbers, not even numbers like 120gb or 80gb.

I don't think it's lame because when I put the drive into my computer, I don't see 120gb, I see 111gb.

 

[peach]

The Western Digital harddisk from my last computer crashed and burned, so screw them!

 

[peach]

okay maybe it didn't burn, but it still crashed

 

[kyleirwin]

yeah, i had a 3 month old serial ata drive die on me w/ every website i've done since 7th grade on it, tons of programs, movies, music, notes, IMs, pics... basically my life. i was pretty beat up over it for about a week.

 

[pig2cat]

i have a 80 gb western digital drive, it can hold 74 gb and has served me for more than 1.5 years without any trouble , the 6 gb isnt much of a big deal?

 

[Nathan]

Fair enough, if they mislead the consumer they deserve to face the consequences.

 

[Julez]

i had a western digital drive and it bloody broke with loads of important stuff on it - it turns out there was a fault with a big batch of thier drives - a lot of people were trying to sue them over that a while back - i try not to buy western digital anymore ( once bitten and all that)