[geeks] Seagate buckles to math ignorant consumers

[Francois Dion]

On 11/2/07, John Francini <francini at mac.com> wrote:
> I'm sorry, I fully side with those "math-ignorant" customers.
>
> 1K=1,000 unless it has to do with computer memory. Then, 1K=1024.
> Period.
>
> Computer memory--either on disk or in RAM--isn't addressed in powers
> of 10; it's addressed in powers of 2.
>
> If I buy a, say, 250GB disk, I expect it to have (2**30)*250 bytes of
> capacity.  Not (10**9)*250 bytes. And the disk drive industry has
> been undersizing disks for, oh, 20+ years.  And this problem has
> stuck in my craw for the same 20+ years.
>
> If you put one of those "250 GB" (decimal) disks into your computer,
> what's it going to report: 250 GB of space?  NO! It'll report
> whatever the decimal capacity is, expressed in powers-of-2 Gigabytes.
>
> And because it does that, most people would believe they're not
> getting what they've paid for, especially since the computer's
> telling you. It's because they're not.
>
> At least DEC didn't do that.  When you bought an RZ26 (1GB), RZ28
> (2GB) or RZ29 (4GB) disk drive, you actually got (2**30)*n bytes of
> capacity.
>
> Wouldn't you guys howl and scream if the RAM or Flash RAM makers
> started trying to sell 1-GB decimal RAM?

On flash, they already are. Check df -h on a 256MB or 2GB usb stick,
you will be unpleasantly surprised. The 2GB usb stick I'm giving away
on my blog, with Belenix pre-loaded is showing:
/dev/dsk/c5t0d0s0      1.8G   833M   961M    47%    /media/JD FIREFLY

and rmformat reports:
 2. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c5t0d0p0
        Physical Node: /pci at 0,0/pci1028,1c1 at 1d,7/storage at 7/disk at 0,0
        Connected Device: LEXAR    JD FIREFLY       1100
        Device Type: Removable
        Bus: USB
        Size: 1.9 GB


So it is reporting maybe at most 1.9GB, but 1794MB accounted for per
df -h. On supposedly 2GB.

This reminds me of the old transistor radios. In the marketing
escalation of this radio has x transistors and this has y transistors,
and with the transistors dropping in price drastically, they started
adding transistors that basically did nothing. Not sure what stopped
that less than honest practice back then, and maybe that lawsuit stops
this practice today.

Francois