Western Digital Settles Hard Drive Capacity Dispute

It's a common question: I just bought a hard drive and it says 160GB on the box. When I install it, Windows claims it's only a 149GB drive. What gives?

What gives is a question of mathematics. To most of the computer world, a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, and thus a gigabyte is 1,024 ^ 3 bytes: or 1.0737 billion bytes. But the hard drive world doesn't adhere to this method. To plump up the apparent capacity of their products, drive makers say that 1,000 bytes is a kilobyte, and 1 billion bytes is a gigabyte. And what's the result? They claim 160GB, while Windows says 149GB.

This peeved off some lawyers enough that they filed a lawsuit about it. From the ABC News story: The lawsuit against Western Digital alleged 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, the suit claimed.

If you bought a Western Digital hard drive between March 22, 2001 and February 15, 2006, you are eligible to receive a settlement of (wait for it) some free backup software, worth $30 a copy. To file a claim, visit this page. A similar suit against Seagate is still pending.

For their trouble, the lawyers receive $500,000 in fees and expenses. Or, looking at it another way, 488.3 kilobucks.