When the sector size is changed to 500 from 512, I will accept a decimal notation.
Not sure why but they will have to stand in line.
Because a GB is 10^9 bytes (i.e. the HD manufacturers are correct), while Microsoft thinks it's 2^30 bytes and uses it as such. Easiest way around it is to have Windows describe storage in GiB.
ViRGE
Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
- Oct 9, 1999
- 31,516
- 167
- 106
The fact that the court hasn't even made an initial ruling makes this whole thing shady. This matter won't even be settled for years, and any settlement should Seagate be found guilty likely won't be for what the ambulance chasers want. It's way too early to be passing out this kind of information and taking names.
Yeah, I'm not bothering with the memory lawsuit that's going on for just that reason. I won't bother with this one because it's bull.
ViRGE
Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
- Oct 9, 1999
- 31,516
- 167
- 106
You certainly don't have to participate in the memory lawsuit, but there's no advantage (moral or otherwise) in not participating. The memory cartel ripped off the American market to the tune of 1 billion dollars; they've already plead guilty and ponied up nearly the same billion in fines, along with jail time for many of the executives.
Nobody sues the fort knox of insuability anymore. The've just come to accept MS as the power that be.
What if your 64 bit turned out to be only 63.99995126?
This thread is enlightening. I had no idea that there where such strong feelings about the definition of the byte prefix. Nor did I know the currently technically correct term KiB. Measurements have evolved throughout history. For example, a Roman mile was 5000ft and the first Queen Elizabeth changed it to 5280ft. What's technically correct today could be different tomorrow. Not all bytes have been 8 bits - some have been 9 or 7 bits. Some computer architectures could only address a word (up to 36bits) and some have been bit addressable. Current consumer pc architectures have an 8 bit byte and are byte addressable.
I have always felt that hard disk manufacturers were playing fast and loose to pump up the numbers a little. This doesn't mean I was correct - it's just the way I felt. I know that if I have a 100GB of data, I need a disk slightly bigger to actually hold it - ignoring the fact that an actively used disk shouldn't be filled more than 70-80% to prevent thrashing. This isn't something I'm angry about or feel that something should be 'done' about but something I keep in mind - as with a mortgage loan, you always pay a little more than what's advertised - whether in real rates or fees or both.
People I know who 'know' computers, use the term 1KB to designate 1024 bytes. By knowing, I don't mean someone who can fly in a browser but someone who, among other things, is fluent in binary - someone who can tell you what 2^7 is in base 10 without thinking about it or who immediately gets the tagline: "There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don't". For these misfits, any representation of size including KB, MB, etc. is understood to mean some power of two bytes. Never have I heard the use of KiB, MiB, etc. or seen it any internally produced documentation.
I don't think there is disagreement on the technical aspects, but commonly accepted usage is debatable. If I had to take a stand on the issue, I would say that the majority of consumers have no clue as to what a byte is. They think of hard disk capacity in terms of the number of photographs or movies it can hold and that a 500gb disk is twice as big as a 250gb disk. I believe that in the accounting world there is the phrase "generally accepted practice". It appears that in regards to disk size representation, we're not there yet. Or maybe we are. "Commonly accepted" usually means a majority of people. If it is, I guess I will be in the minority.
Most people celebrated the beginning of the current millennium in the year 2000 (y2k) and a few who, knowing that there was no year zero, celebrated in 2001. Who was correct?
I have always felt that hard disk manufacturers were playing fast and loose to pump up the numbers a little. This doesn't mean I was correct - it's just the way I felt. I know that if I have a 100GB of data, I need a disk slightly bigger to actually hold it - ignoring the fact that an actively used disk shouldn't be filled more than 70-80% to prevent thrashing. This isn't something I'm angry about or feel that something should be 'done' about but something I keep in mind - as with a mortgage loan, you always pay a little more than what's advertised - whether in real rates or fees or both.
People I know who 'know' computers, use the term 1KB to designate 1024 bytes. By knowing, I don't mean someone who can fly in a browser but someone who, among other things, is fluent in binary - someone who can tell you what 2^7 is in base 10 without thinking about it or who immediately gets the tagline: "There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don't". For these misfits, any representation of size including KB, MB, etc. is understood to mean some power of two bytes. Never have I heard the use of KiB, MiB, etc. or seen it any internally produced documentation.
I don't think there is disagreement on the technical aspects, but commonly accepted usage is debatable. If I had to take a stand on the issue, I would say that the majority of consumers have no clue as to what a byte is. They think of hard disk capacity in terms of the number of photographs or movies it can hold and that a 500gb disk is twice as big as a 250gb disk. I believe that in the accounting world there is the phrase "generally accepted practice". It appears that in regards to disk size representation, we're not there yet. Or maybe we are. "Commonly accepted" usually means a majority of people. If it is, I guess I will be in the minority.
Most people celebrated the beginning of the current millennium in the year 2000 (y2k) and a few who, knowing that there was no year zero, celebrated in 2001. Who was correct?
Anubis
No Lifer
i think i own about 30 seagate drives and im not even gonna bother with this crap, because i dont fucking care, ill get like 1$, prob spens more on postage sending my info to them
nearly all class actions lawsuits are worthless for the end user, only one that was decent was the one against Creative, cause i got a 50$ credit on a new sound card, which i purchased and then sold for massive profit and purchased another brand
nearly all class actions lawsuits are worthless for the end user, only one that was decent was the one against Creative, cause i got a 50$ credit on a new sound card, which i purchased and then sold for massive profit and purchased another brand
Anubis
No Lifer
tracerbullet
Golden Member
- Feb 22, 2001
- 1,661
- 19
- 81
All 5 of my last ones were Newegg OEM's as well. Rats. Don't deserve compensation, but would have taken it. Denied.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9385 doesn't differentiate between retail and oem units.
"customers must have purchased the hard drive as a discrete unit, as hard drives shipped with pre-built computers are not eligible under the proposed terms."
The article starts out like this is a done deal but the at the end mentions that the final hearing has not yet occurred.
Describing storage capacity in bit-granularity would be the utmost in precision with no possibility for interpretation. Its an unwieldy way of describing storage capacity, but not useless. I understand 640 billion bits or 80 billion bytes = 80GB, don't you?
No, they use them because that's how [some] operating systems and software have presented storage capacity to them for about 22 years, whereas storage manufacturers have been doing base-10 for 40 years. This was purely an elective choice by operating system (and other software) developers when most computer users possessed technical competence comparable to their own, for whom none of this was a mystery.
Since computers have filtered down to a class of users who don't even know there exists such a thing as binary math, there is really no good reason to continue presenting storage capacity to the user as a decimal representation of a binary number. Either use the SI prefixes correctly (base-10) or adopt the new binary prefixes (base-2). From the Wiki aforementioned:
Thus, binary calculations of storage capacity are only beneficial or needed 'internally' to the OS or system from a programming or addressing stand-point (e.g. RAM), and has no benefit at all to the user. The only argument for it is because that's the way they've always done it, just like the storage manufacturers, except that storage manufacturers have been doing it 20+ years longer (creating the de facto standard for storage capacity calculation, which software developers decided to depart from).
There probably are such lawsuits in the works, or will be. I didn't know about the Seagate lawsuit until I recieved notice of proposed settlement, did you?
I use SI in the binary sense all the time, but then I've understood the difference between decimal and binary calculations of storage capacity since the 1980s. There is nothing hypocritical about my position.
On the contrary, I'm arguing there is absolutely nothing wrong with base-10 calculations of storage capacity. It's been the de facto standard as long as there have been computer storage devices, far longer than commercial operating systems have been presenting storage capacity using SI prefixes in the binary sense. In fact, storage capacity has been calculated in base-10 since BEFORE the SI prefixes were adopted!
If its so easy for storage manufacturers to depart from a 40 year-old de facto standard that is 100% consistent with the rest of the world, then it should be completely trivial for software developers to depart from their 20 year-old customary practice which is at odds with the rest of the world.
Brainonska511
Lifer
- Dec 10, 2005
- 27,922
- 12,464
- 136
So I guess I can qualify.... I wouldn't even bother. The one hard drive that my parents bought for their computer (that I built) was $65, so they'd get less than $5 back. As for the drive that I bought for my notebook when a book fell on it killing the original drive, that was after the cash deadline and backup software is useless to me as I found something that works very well for free (syncback).
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