Why is Computer HDD Size False Advertisement still allowed?

KVW

Can someone explain to me why hard drive manufacturers and retailers are still allowed to sell HDDs that do not contain anywhere near the amount advertised? It was alright way back when they were 1GB and 2GB drives and you were barely missing anything, but I don't see how they can still be allowed to sell a 1TB HDD that's missing nearly 10% of that total (it's like 70 GB if I'm not mistaken, total of 930 GB or so). And no, this isn't space used by the operating system being missing. It's something retarded like them using 1000 MB = 1 GB instead of the correct amounts.

Shouldn't laws force them to use the actual standard of a GB / MB / kb / etc when making these labels? Has anyone ever took them to court over this or tried to lobby to make them label it correctly? What's to stop me from releasing a 1000 TB drive and just having it with 100GB on it and say I'm just counting bytes differently than everyone else? While an extreme example, that's the equivilent of what they're doing right now. A 500 GB drive should have 500 GB's on it, not 465GB.

Does anyone have any information on why they are allowed to do this? I've searched Google, but couldn't come up wiht anything.

Doc

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20060629225834.html
http://apcmag.com/seagate_settles_class_action_cash_back_over_misleading_hard_drive_capacities.htm

They settle class action lawsuits instead of actually going to court, losing, and having to change their marketing practices.

khain

The hard drive manufacturers are the ones using the correct definition of Giga, and mega etc, according to the International System of Units.

Bama

We had a thread about this a while back. What it comes down to is the HDD manufacturers are actually counting the right way, even though it goes against convention. New prefixes are being phased in to mark the difference.

Technicality

Using the standard kilo giga etc. scale for computers is daft, but that doesn't stop them being technically right.

EggyToast

It's because the hard drive manufacturers argue that they're using the SI designation for mega, giga, tera, etc, where 1=1000, 1=1000000 etc. This differs from how all computers use information, though, as to them a kilobyte equals 1012, etc.

Technically a 500GB drive DOES have 500GB -- it has 500 giga bytes.

Companies have actually lost class action suits (Seagate most recently, I believe). They just need to specify on the retail boxes what the computer will see, though. And yes, I think it's dumb -- you should use the units as they will be recognized by their usage. If hard drives are ONLY used in computers, then you should advertise them based on what the computer will display as the drive's size. It's trivial to bump it up, but they don't.

You'd have better luck emailing Seagate than trying to find a good answer as to why they still do it, though.