Computer Makers Sued Over Hard-Drive Size Claims

Yahoo/Reuters ^ | September 18, 2003

[FourPeas]

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A group of computer owners has filed a lawsuit against some of the world's biggest makers of personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives.

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The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed earlier this week in Los Angeles Superior Court against Apple Computer Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL - news), Dell Inc. (Nasdaq:DELL - news), Gateway Inc. (NYSE:GTW - news), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ - news), IBM (NYSE:IBM - news), Sharp Corp. (6753.T), Sony Corp (news - web sites). (6758.T) and Toshiba Corp. (6502.T)

The lawsuit brought by Los Angeles residents Lanchau Dan, Adam Selkowitz, Tim Swan and John Zahabian centers around the way that computer hard drives are described by manufacturers.

Representatives of the eight defendants were not immediately available to comment.

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.

The plaintiffs said this difference in convention is deceptive and leaves buyers with less storage than they thought they were getting when they purchased their computers.

For example, when a consumer buys what he thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140 gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.

The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees.

[FourPeas]

*sigh*

[steplock]

The key phrase here - in the last sentence....

...and attorneys' fees

Need I say more?

[EggsAckley]

Ugh. Does this mean that my 120 gig Vaio is actually only 110? Still a lot better than the old IBM with it 6 gigs!

[Liberal Classic]

Sheesh, I guess these people don't know that the filesystem takes up space itself.

[cryptical]

I hope this doesn't become precedent, or down the road several ladies from my past might sue me for similar claims.

[Revolting cat!]

That explains, at last, why we have been running out of disk space.

[Onelifetogive]

and attorneys' fees.

Of course...

[Billthedrill]

Please, please tell me you just made this up... :-(

They're actually giving us a break. A "K"byte is commonly thought to be 1000 bytes, but due to binary notation it's actually 1024. I'm thinking the manufacturers are going to want to charge extra for the 24 additional bytes.

Where do they get these morons?

[ThePythonicCow]

Good grief.

[headsonpikes]

The next thing you know, women will be suing men on these grounds!

Stop the madness now!

[MeSpikeLibs]

This what you get from lawyers with nothing else to do.

[Gorzaloon]

I hope this doesn't become precedent, or down the road several ladies from my past might sue me for similar claims.

So maybe Western Digital et al can just say the drives were cold or scared.....?

[HAL9000]

I think most of the computer manufacturers put a disclaimer in their technical specification.

For example, Apple's specifications say "1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less."

[Tijeras_Slim]

But Baby... I swear it's 20 gigs.

[ThePythonicCow]

Have you ever received a letter in the mail explaining that you were party to some million dollar class action suit; and persuing it determined that you'd end up with dollar off coupon good for 30 days against your next SUV purchase?

Then join with me -- in a class action suit by all former parties to class action suits, against the attorneys who profited there from, for rounding down the value of the payoff not by 2% as in this disk case, but by 99.2%, for their fees.

---

It's especially ironic that this is against disk drive vendors -- perhaps the finest example in human history of rapidly increasing bank for the buck.

[ThePythonicCow]

Oops - bank bang

[Voltage]

My speedometer goes up to 120 mph. There is no way it would go that fast. Can I sue? Should I test it out on the highway first?

[js1138]

Among other things, they will run up against longstanding practice. Not to mention the disclaimers on every drive package.

[Elliott Jackalope]

I really think you are on to something here. We need a class action lawsuit against class action lawyers. Why should people who have been injured or wronged by someone have to settle for coupons or five dollar settlements while the lawyers rake in millions?

It is long past time to sue the lawyers who have pushed class action lawsuits for fraud and deceptive practices (like pretending that plaintiffs in class actions lawsuits actually get anything of value), and turned them into a lottery for shysters that never, ever pays off for those who are wronged in the first place.

[ThePythonicCow]

You're dang right.