A Letter to Seagate Support

(Check back as this conversation is updated)

Remember my rant about hard drive capacity?  My company recently bought a "750GB" Seagate hard drive, but when I installed it, it was only 698GB.  I had also bought a 2TB Western Digital MyBook Live drive, which, strangely enough, on comuputers reports as a total capacity of - 2TB.  Hmm.  What is going on here?

So I opened a support case with Seagate, and this is the response, which I was totally expecting:

Dear Jay Imerman:

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

I understand that the drive's capacity appears to be less than advertised.

This is due to a translation from a decimal number system to the binary number system that the operating system uses.

Here are two Knowledge Base articles that explain this thoroughly:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/194563en

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/172191en

Please let me know if I can explain anything further.

For additional assistance, feel free to contact us at: www.seagate.com/about/contact-us/technical-support/

Regards,

Shawn

Seagate Support

My response?  I'll bet you 1 GigaDollars it falls on deaf ears.

Shawn,

Thank you for your reply.  I have been a computer expert and professional for over 25 years.  In that time, I have deployed hardware and software in small to large multinational organizations, written and implemented software to manage and manipulate data, and have dealt with many aspects of modern computing.  I have never seen a byte defined as anything other than 8 bits (aka binary digits, or a single on/off represented by 1 and 0).  One Kilobyte has always been, and is defined in every Operating System throughout the planet, as 1024 Bytes because computers compute in binary.  1 MB is 1024 KB, or 1,048,576 Bytes.  Therefore, 1GB is, by definition, 1,073,741,824 Bytes.

Are you telling me that you can arbitrarily redefine a mile, and sell me a string that is 3 miles long, and say no, 1 mile is 100 feet, and 1 foot is 100 inches?  So you give me 10,000 inches, when I am buying 63,360?  Sorry, it doesn't work like that.  If you look at the first link you provided, you indicate a column "Binary Value in Decimal" and "Decimal Equivalent."  I don't know what math you took, don't mean to be rude, but 1024 is not equal to 1000.  (The "In Decimal" is the key, it is decimal - in Binary it is 10000000000, which is 1024 Decimal.  So you can't just try to sell me on the fact that 1024=1000.)

IEEE is the governing body for international standards, and you can easily see this standard conforms to what I have laid out above.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JEDEC_memory_standards

Your drive says it is 750GB, and there is not a single operating system on this planet for computers that will report it as 750GB?  That means Seagate cheated us out of 52GB by listing the drive as 750GB capacity.  I would suggest that you list JEDEC capacity, if you want to list it as a 750GB drive, then also on the box and in literature and web listings, also list the JEDEC capacity according to IEEE 100 standards so consumers can accurately compare.

I recently purchased a Western Digital 2TB MyBook Live drive, which reports 1.998 TB of space on OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu Linux.  There is a small overhead of formatting for the file system, this is understood, and the full drive capacity does say 2TB.  This is an industry standard, that has been accepted universally in all countries since the beginning of electronic computer storage.

Since we are missing 6.9% of the storage it says on your literature, you should reimburse my company 6.9% of the purchase price.  We bought it from CDW for $132.99, so a refund of $9.18 sounds reasonable.

Best Regards,

Jay Imerman

Dear Jay,

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

Here is another helpful link to help explain the difference between Decimal and Binary. Seagate, as well as all hard drive manufacturers, sell drive capacities based on their decimal value.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/09/gigabyte-decimal-vs-binary.html

Also if you check section 4.3 in the following wiki, you will find useful information regarding how IEC binary prefixes are not used by hard drive manufacturers. Instead SI prefixs are used to state the capacity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

For additional assistance, feel free to contact us at: www.seagate.com/about/contact-us/technical-support/

Regards,

Jason

Seagate Support

 

Thank you, that clearly explains the history and how this huge discrepancy came about.  However, my original issue remains.  If you are selling say gasoline by the ounce, you would never in a million years list:

Gasoline 300 oz $15

And expect people to think you are selling it by volume.  Obviously oz means weight, while "fl oz" means volume.   Both are ounce (in my analogy for GB and GB for Gigabytes and Gibibytes).  The ridiculousness of it all is highlighted by my spell checker, which has never heard of the term "Gibibyte" before.

The fact that you have to put these FAQ pages out there means it is confusing and, I do declare, deliberately or not, misleading.

When I buy a hard drive, I expect the label on the box to match what I see in my window in the OS.  I think that is fair and reasonable.  We wouldn't be having this conversation if your drive had said "698GB JEDEC standard" or even "698 Gibibytes" or "750 GB - IEEE 1541-2002 standard".  That is totally clear, kind of like "gram," "Kg," "L", "dL" as opposed to "ounces" and "fluid ounces."

Western Digital doesn't try to deceive its customers in this way, no matter if you use the auspices of the SI standard to justify perpetrating the misunderstanding.

Best Regards,

Jay Imerman

 

Dear Jay,

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

I completely understand your confusion. I am glad that I was able to provide clarification on the issue. I appreciate the feedback and I will forward this suggestion to the appropriate department.

For additional assistance, feel free to contact us at: www.seagate.com/about/contact-us/technical-support/

Regards,

Jason

Seagate Support

 

Thanks so much!  You can send the refund to:

--ADDRESS DELETED--

Best Regards,

Jay Imerman

Dear Jay:

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

Unfortunately we will not be able to send you a refund. We can however replace the drive for you. 

For additional assistance, feel free to contact us at: www.seagate.com/about/contact-us/technical-support/ 

Regards,

John

Seagate Support

Thanks for your reply, John.

Well, the drive is working fine, but the issue I have is with capacity.  Would a replacement fix that problem, and give me a reported capacity in the OS as 750GB (meaning Gibibytes not Gigabytes)?

Best Regards,

Jay Imerman

_________________________________________________________

What followed was several more e-mails - oh, how shall I say it?  Have you ever written a program that does something, and loops back waiting for a condition that never happens?  It is called an endless loop.  One e-mail says "I don't think you were sent the link explaining Binary to Decimal conversion" at which I reply yes, but that doesn't solve the problem, followed by "this guy's blog explains the discrepancy" - each answered by a different person, none of whom were ever involved in the conversation more than once.  I have this picture in my head of a large tech support team, passing this one around, and the handful of other pain-in-the-ass e-mails they get from people like me, waiting for us to give up.  Well, guess I've proven my point - but at least I bothered them a bit.



Now, here's something interesting.  Tuesday June 18 is now more than 3 months after the issue was closed out., I get this:

From: CEB Customer Surveys [mailto:CEBCustomerSurveys@executiveboard.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 9:49
To: Jay Imerman
Subject: Seagate - Request for Customer Feedback

Seagate and the CEB, an independent research company, invite you to participate in a customer service survey designed to gauge your opinions on how to provide excellent customer service.

Seagate is participating in the survey because we would like to know how our customers feel about these topics and find out what is important to them in terms of customer service.  By completing this survey you can help us shape our future service offerings.

This survey will take approximately five to ten minutes to complete.  Your responses will only be used to analyze your opinions about different customer service offerings, so please be as candid and direct as possible.

Click here to access the survey:

[-- link removed --]

Thank you in advance for your participation!