Gadgetopia

Computer Makers Sued Over Hard-Drive Size Claims: The hard drive you’re buying may be smaller than you think.

“According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.

The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 18.6 gigabytes of readable capacity, the lawsuit said.”

This reminds me of the lawsuit about monitor size that resulted in the “Viewable Image” footnote to monitor advertisements. This isn’t as trivial as it sounds — the more accurate this stuff is, the better, and lawsuits are just a growing pain we need to go through to get everyone on the same page.