You go to your retail electronics store and look for a big hard drive. You see a 300 GB hard drive on the shelf from Western Digital and you think that’s large enough to last you a lifetime. In fact, I thought the same a few years ago with my 10GB hard drive…except it’s all full now. But back to the point, you go home, install it in your computer, and insert the Serial ATA data cable and the power connector to the drive. You boot it up, and the first step is to partition it. At that moment, unless you are a technician, you’re greeted with a pleasant surprise. That is, you will have much less than 300GB of capacity in the drive.

This rude awakening resulted in a recent class-action lawsuit against Western Digital. In Orin Safier v. Western Digital Corporation, The plaintiff filed several complaints against the HDD giant. The plaintiff lodged an official complaint. In brief, the complaint states that Western Digital knowingly, maliciously, and deceptively over-stated its hard drive capacities. Let me explain how this was done.

Like in any other industry, the hard drive companies throw a little curve ball at you when you’re purchasing a hard drive. On face, you are purchasing a “300 GB” hard drive. Hard drive companies, like Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate, imply 300,000 MB, or 300,000,000 KB, or 300,000,000,000 bytes. Like many SI unit conversions, these are based on base-ten. 1000 milliliters (mL) is equivalent to 1 liter (L). Likewise, 50 kilograms (kg) is the same as 50,000 grams (g). Conversion in computers, however, is not as easy. Instead of using simple decimal system as witnessed above, hard drive measurements use a base-two binary system. One kilobyte is now 1024 bytes (2¹⁰). One megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. As a result, advertising a 300,000,000,000 byte hard drive as a 300GB hard drive is misleading. Instead of reporting as a “300GB hard drive”, the drive should report as nearly 279GB. Simply, the math is three hundred billion (amount of real bytes) divided by the binary conversion for gigabytes (2³⁰).

The plaintiff further argues that “The difference between the represented amount of storage capacity and the actual amount of storage capacity available to the Plaintiff is not insignificant, but rather approximately 7% of the total storage capacity on Plaintiff’s HDD. Indeed, Plaintiff could have stored approximately 80 hours of MP3 music, 160 hours of WMA music, 5600 digital pictures or 36,700 copies of this Class Action Complaint in .doc format on a drive with a 5.6 GB capacity.“ Yes, the 7% discrepancy in capacity is rather substantial.

My thought was; but why the heck would anyone in their right mind put 36,700 copies of a legal document on their computer? (Yes, I know it was to make a point)

Western Digital (WD), in its brief filed on February 15, 2006, noted that like the plaintiff acknowledges, WD uses the decimal system on “virtually all” of its hard drives, like “virtually all’ other computer manufacturers. Western Digital, as they would say, is doing nothing differently from Seagate/Maxtor, Samsung, or Hitachi. In addition, all manufacturers list a disclaimer noting that a “gigabyte” is defined as one billion bytes well before the development of this lawsuit despite not being obliged by the law.

Not wanting to bleed more money than necessary, WD proposed a settlement, resulting in their paying a mere half a million dollars in combined court fees that was approved by the plaintiff. In the notice of class-action suit, WD acknowledges any person who purchased an aftermarket hard disk drive from WD between March 22, 2001 and February 15, 2006, excluding close relations to the corporation, are class members in the suit. The class members were offered a cash reimbursement of 7.50 USD and a free copy of EMC Dantz Retrospect software, a data backup/data recovery software. WD also promised to mark a disclaimer (”1 gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.”) onto its hard drive packaging within six months of the suit.

In case you are a class member, complete a claim form here.

My Take:
Personally, I find this lawsuit ridiculous. 7% capacity discrepancy on an “80GB” hard drive can be substantial (5.6GB ain’t small) especially on larger capacities – but to bring it to a class action suit? I don’t approve of the entire concept of marketing an 80GB hard drive as an “80GB hard drive” if it isn’t. But it has been standard practice across the industry for years. Consumers particular about their purchases would generally research their products and without a doubt would come across one of the many warnings on the web about the issue, including WD’s own FAQ (answer ID 615). In my opinion, there are greater issues of misrepresentation in the computer industry than this capacity discrepancy fiasco (power supply unit wattage comes to mind). If this is a precedence, we’ll have to lodge a lawsuit the next time my power supply doesn’t supply exactly its rated amount of power, or the next time my printer doesn’t give me the exact prints per cartridge as is advertised.