Seagate Settles Suit Over ‘Gigabyte’ Definition — BetaNews

Seagate is planning to settle its lawsuit over the definition of a “gigabyte.”

Apparently, Seagate chose to use the decimal definition of a gigabyte, which would mean 1 billion bytes. However, this would lead to some confusion since typically computers will report storage by the binary definition, which is 1,073,741,824 bytes.

As long as I can remember, hard drive manufacturers have utilized the decimal notation to advertise hard drives. And, as long as I can remember, almost-computer-geeks have complained about it. Usually, the average user doesn’t understand how to even check if they have received the right amount of storage space on the purchased drive. At the other end of the spectrum, computer geeks understand that binary is used to calculate.

Because the binary system is used, the number “1000″ is not the nice number it is in decimal. In binary “1024″ is as magical and perfect a number as “1000″ is in decimal (for those of you that are visual, the number “1000″ in decimal is written “10000000000″ in binary — look at all those pretty zeroes!). The end result is that there is a little misconception because of a consumer’s bias toward the decimal system.

Hard drive manufacturers should tell consumers exactly how much space they are getting, in decimal; or, manufacturers should plainly state that the advertised amount is in binary. Either way, I don’t care, but then again, I’m a computer geek that always knew I wasn’t getting as big of a hard drive as other people thought they were getting.