Customers v Western Digital Corp.
Western Digital Settles Lawsuit over Hard Drive Capacity
Western Digital Corp. has settled a class action lawsuit alleging that its computer hard drives stored less material than promised by offering free software to about 1 million consumers.
Under the terms of the settlement, Western Digital will give away software designed to back up and recover computer files to anyone who bought one of the company's disk drives from March 22, 2001, through Feb. 15, 2006.
"The dispute over hard-drive capacity highlights the contradictory methods for measuring the bits and bytes that devour a computer's memory," states a lawyer for the plaintiffs. "Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc., which make the operating systems for most personal computers, use a binary system to measure kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes while most disk drive manufacturers like Western Digital derive their calculations from the more-familiar decimal system" said a lawyer handling the case.
"The difference can add up to a substantial gap between what's promised on a hard drive's packaging and what gets stored on a personal computer," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs. The lawsuit claims the company's 80-gigabyte hard drive had an actual capacity of 74.4 gigabytes. "If not for that 7 percent shortfall, the buyer could have stored an additional 80 hours of digital music or 5,600 digital pictures" said a plaintiffs lawyer.
