Missing Hard Drive Capacity: Seagate / Western Digital
We represented people who purchased Seagate or Western Digital hard disk drives separately from their computers. The suit claimed that these companies overstated the capacity of their drives by approximately 7%. For example, a Seagate or Western Digital 100GB drive has only about 93.02GB of usable capacity when attached to or installed in a personal computer. The reason is that the companies define "GB" to equal 1,000,000,000 bytes, while computer operating systems define "GB" to equal 1,073,741,824 bytes.
In both cases, we obtained court-approved settlements. Each purchaser of a Seagate drive had the option to receive a cash refund equal to five percent of the purchase price, or a suite of backup and recovery software valued at $40. Western Digital purchasers had the right to free backup and recovery software valued at $30. Both companies had to change their advertising disclosures.