When is a Gig a Gig?

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief November 5, 2007 · 1 min read

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Seagate has made a settlement with the State of California in a class action suit regarding the nomenclature used for the GB. Yes, that 80GB HDD you recently bought isn’t really 80GB. Now, when is a Gig a Gig?

Apparently this lawsuit is based on two interpretations of what a GB is. From our experience in computer class a KB is 1,024B; an MB is 1,024KB; and a GB is 1,024 MB or 1,073,741,824 bytes. However, hard drive manufacturers used 1,000 instead of 1,024 so that a HDD listed or marked as 80GB is just actually 74.5GB. That’s 7% below actual reported capacity.

Now, anyone who bought a Seagate hard drive in the US between 22 March 2001 and 26 September 2007 could be entitled to a five per cent (5%) discount on future Seagate products or free backup software according to The Register.

This settlement is only in effect in the US though and I don’t see Seagate changing this nomenclature any time soon. The Seagate Hard Drive Settlement website can be found here.

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

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30 Comments

Walter · 18 years ago

my 250GB HDD registers only at 236GB

vance · 19 years ago

the difference is on how manufacturers calculate the disk space from the physical size.

But still 70Gb is alot of movies, music and pictures.

Goe Dee · 19 years ago

I learned this computation in my Computer class back in High School i think. The thing that I didn’t know is, Seagate people didn’t know it. They used mega for 1,000,000. and kilo for 1,000 which is not wrong. But the right computation must me base on Bytes and Bits.

andre · 19 years ago

dapat kasi para di na ambiguous, we use “i” in between the prefix and the “B” to denote base 2 prefixes, e.g.

1 KiB = 1,024 bytes
1 KB = 1,000 bytes

1 MiB = 1,048,576 bytes
1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes

kung maging standard sana yun ganyang usage, walang ambiguity.

brewedminds · 19 years ago

The lesson here is to always check the items or products you’ll buy.

J · 19 years ago

maybe they should start using MiB instead of MB?

leo · 19 years ago

they’re even suing GOD over there.

Red · 19 years ago

No wonder my 512MB usb flash disk just goes only 490.2MB. Even if its freakin empty, and i’ve like formatted and partitioned it a couple of times, it just apears to be 400 plus in mb.

mine’s in kingston.

pao · 19 years ago

gee. I’ve always known 1GB isnt really 1GB, but I never cared to demand it to be otherwise. :)

teampilipinas blog · 19 years ago

The usage of the word “gigabyte” is ambiguous, depending on the context…

-One gigabyte is roughly equal to 18 hours of MP3 music at 128 kbit/s

-One gigabyte is roughly equivalent to 12 hours of Flash Video (at 450×370)

-Dual-layer Blu-ray Discs and dual-layer HD DVD discs can hold about 50 gigabytes (50,000,000,000 bytes) and 30 gigabytes (30,000,000,000 bytes) of data, respectively

just an info… cheers.. YUGAbyte!!! keep it up!

Lloyd Lopez · 19 years ago

I already submitted a claim for my Seagate 320gb HD I bought last March (Newegg). Supposedly, I should receive a backup and recovery software from them. Still waiting for their response though…