Seagate purchasers are entitled to free software or 5% cash back ... US only ?

dualmeister

dualmeister

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Damn I see it is only for US clients :(

You are a member of the Settlement Class if, between March 22, 2001, and September 26, 2007, you purchased in the United States a new Seagate Retail Hard Drive. A "Retail Hard Drive" is a Seagate brand hard disc drive that you purchased from an authorized Seagate retailer or distributor, separately as a Seagate product that was not pre-installed into and sold bundled with a personal computer or other electronic device.
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http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9385
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins has more than a few things to worry about: Seagate purchasers are entitled to free software or 5% cash back

With Cho v. Seagate Technology Holdings, Inc. wrapping up, Seagate customers who purchased a hard drive in OEM or retail packaging between the dates of March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007 are eligible to receive one of two different settlement benefits per hard drive purchased:

* The “cash benefit” is available to customers who purchased a Seagate hard drive between March 22, 2001 and January 1, 2006, and entitles customers to receive 5% cash back on the amount they paid for the hard drive, before taxes. Claims for a cash benefit must be filed using the mail-in form, which is available on the settlement web site.
* The “software benefit” is available to customers who purchased a Seagate hard drive between the dates of March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007, and entitles claimants to a free copy of the Seagate Software Suite, which retails for $40. Claims for a software benefit can be filled out online.

In both cases, customers must have purchased the hard drive as a discrete unit, as hard drives shipped with pre-built computers are not eligible under the proposed terms.

Cho v. Seagate was filed in April of 2005 by Sara Cho over claims that Seagate falsely advertised the capacity of their hard drives, overstating it by 7%. The nature of these claims lies in the difference between a gigabyte (1,000,000,000 bytes of 1 GB) and a giga binary byte (1,073,741,824 bytes or 1 GiB), as the abbreviation of “GB” is often used for both.

Seagate has denied and continued to deny both the false advertising claims and the fact that it has harmed anyone, and as of yet the courts have not ruled on the merits of the case.

Under the proposed terms of the settlement, Seagate will be required to:

* Make “certain disclosures” about the nature of its hard drives’ storage capacity.
* Reimburse affected customers with the benefits listed above.
* Pay $1.8 million in attorney’s fees to the plaintiff’s counsel.

The final hearing date to approve the settlement will take place on February 7, 2008 at the San Francisco Superior Court.
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http://www.harddrive-settlement.com/doc-MailIn.htm
 
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this really makes me angry.
the difference is measurement has LONG LONG F***ING long been known to techies.

but joe soap in the street finds it too difficuly to understand, so dumb it down, then sue because the dumbed down version doesnt correlate.

here is an idea: IF YOU DONT UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGY THEN GO GET F***** AND LEAVE US ALONE.

prediction: others follow suit, all hdd manufacturers have to cough up, hdd prices go up, I SUFFER BECAUSE OF YOUR IGNORANCE.

next in line: my 17" monitor is only 16.9inches visible (oh wait..that has been done already)

lets sue the stiffy disc makers..1.44mb i think not.

gonna go drink now. depressed. and die moer in.
 
Yeah but I made an image of an 80 GIG Hitachi drive the other day and tried to write it back to an 80 GIG Seagate. It would not fit. True Image said the drive was too small. I also want compensation :D
 
I've always had a problem with the labelling of drives. Why can't they just put the real storage capacity on the drives? Maybe they need to be sued to do away with this deceptive labelling. Yes anyone who knows anything about hard drives knows that drive manufacturers have been lying about the real capacity of their drives, but what has stopped them from just stating the real capacity?

The same with monitors and TVs. State the actual visible screen area, not the size of the tube. There is no valid reason not to give the real value.
 
* Pay $1.8 million in attorney’s fees to the plaintiff’s counsel.

Lawyers are scoring big time :), while you argue over silly stuff.
 
BiteMe said:
this really makes me angry.
the difference is measurement has LONG LONG F***ING long been known to techies.

but joe soap in the street finds it too difficuly to understand, so dumb it down, then sue because the dumbed down version doesnt correlate.

here is an idea: IF YOU DONT UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGY THEN GO GET F***** AND LEAVE US ALONE.

prediction: others follow suit, all hdd manufacturers have to cough up, hdd prices go up, I SUFFER BECAUSE OF YOUR IGNORANCE.

next in line: my 17" monitor is only 16.9inches visible (oh wait..that has been done already)

lets sue the stiffy disc makers..1.44mb i think not.

gonna go drink now. depressed. and die moer in.
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"Don't complain you'll make things worse". Silly reasoning.
 
I guess I should be glad its only for US clients. Otherwise I would have to fill out almost a thousand forms :o
 
noxibox said:
The same with monitors and TVs. State the actual visible screen area, not the size of the tube. There is no valid reason not to give the real value.
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That's not the only issue. The HDs are formatted in NTFS, MacOS, FAT32, Linux Ext2, etc. These have different cluster sizes, which means if you have lots of small files and large cluster sizes set, you will loose a lot of space too.
 
PeterCH said:
That's not the only issue. The HDs are formatted in NTFS, MacOS, FAT32, Linux Ext2, etc. These have different cluster sizes, which means if you have lots of small files and large cluster sizes set, you will loose a lot of space too.
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Presumably this could be accommodated for by a simple table printed on the case?
 
File system overhead is a completely separate issue. Hard drives are a computer component and should be using the conventions used in computers. 1kB is not 1000 bytes. It has always been ludicrous that hard drives are labelled as though it were.
 
noxibox said:
File system overhead is a completely separate issue. Hard drives are a computer component and should be using the conventions used in computers. 1kB is not 1000 bytes. It has always been ludicrous that hard drives are labelled as though it were.
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Agreed. They should mark their 160gb drives as 160 000 000 000 bytes instead :-P

It's been the convention for a very very long time and don't see much point in changing it though...
 
bullfrog said:
Agreed. They should mark their 160gb drives as 160 000 000 000 bytes instead :-P

It's been the convention for a very very long time and don't see much point in changing it though...
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Ja, I don't see why you have to sue them and order them to give everyone 5% back. Everyone buying HDD's seperately, and just slightly knowledgeable on computers, knew that they were buying less actual HDD space than the advertisement. So are we going to have to buy 279GB harddrives now instead of 320GB? It just sounds bad and no one cares.

Targetting Seagate as if they are the only people who sell anything with a MB or GB value (Flash drive manufacturers are also "guilty", so are memory cards, ooh and who invented the CD, nail them.) was purely to get as much money out of this as they could.
 
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So I just bought a 500gig drive. Switch it on and I have 465gig avaiable. The reason for this is explained in another thread in detail and in less detail above.

As a non-technical user it is really irritating. It's like buying a Mercedes and only getting 3 wheels on the car! I see the technical vs non-technical debate above and from my point of view by far the majority of people buying these things are non-technical and the boxes should say what they are. It's false advertising as far as I'm concerned.
 
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