Western Digital - Lawsuits

Lawsuits

See also Binary prefix#Legal disputes

Lawsuits have been filed against hard disk manufacturers Seagate and Western Digital, related to the claimed capacity of their drives. The drives are labelled using the "decimal definition" of 1000 bytes to the kilobyte, resulting in a perceived capacity shortfall to those used to the "binary definition" of 1024 bytes to the kilobyte, which is how most operating systems report capacity. While Western Digital maintained that they used "the indisputably correct industry standard for measuring and describing storage capacity", and that they "cannot be expected to reform the software industry", they agreed to settle in March 2006, with a $30 refund to affected customers in the form of backup and recovery software of the same value. A disclaimer is now included with all drives explaining the capacity figures.