Seagate Technology has agreed to reimburse potentially millions of customers and pay up to $1.79 million in plaintiff's attorney fees to settle a lawsuit accusing the world's largest maker of hard drives of overstating the data-storage capacity of those devices, court records show.
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The plaintiffs, suing on behalf of all affected Seagate customers, allege that Seagate's marketing was deceptive because it used the decimal definition of the capacity term "gigabyte," which indicates 1 billion bytes of capacity, instead of the binary definition used by operating systems, which translates that measurement into 1.07 billion bytes, a difference of 7 percent.
Seagate was technically correct to call 1 billion bytes a gigabyte, but it's also kind of a shady practice. I'm torn, though, between my inner prescriptivist language nazi and my aversion to the totally retarded kibi/mibi/gibi prefixes.
