Posted 9:24 AM

Dell, others sued over size of hard drives - 2003-09-18 - Austin Business Journal

The competition for stupidest class-action lawsuit of the year just heated up as a number of clueless Southern Californians sue Dell, Apple, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba over the advertised size of disk drives on their computers. Seems they're appalled that the manufacturers advertise a 20 gigabyte disk drive, but there's only 18+ gig of usable storage space. The plaintiffs lawyers spout some gobbledegook about the difference between binary and decimal notation (i.e., 1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes, not 1000 megabytes) but the real truth is that the manufacturers advertise the unformated capacity - that's the way its been for the past 20 years, at least. Formatting, partitioning and other housekeeping can use approx. 10% of the drive space. Nothing's new, nothing's different, nothing's misleading. Just another sleazy lawyer looking for a quick payoff.