[shifuimam]

If you bought a Seagate hard drive between March 22nd, 2001 and September 26, 2007, you might be eligible for free software or cash.

Of course, the cash will apparently amount to 5% of the purchase price, which means you'll be getting like $5 or less, but still.

Anyone going to sign up for this?

[Laminar]

I did buy a 160 gig drive for a computer I built a while back, but it was remanufactured and from eBay anyway. I doubt I'll go through the trouble to get $5-10

[Big Mac]

Do class actions ever work out well for anyone other than lawyers?

[Mrjinglesusa]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

Do class actions ever work out well for anyone other than lawyers?

Not unless you are so hard up for cash that it's worth your time and energy to wait 6-8 weeks to receive a check for less than $20. Personally, I never bother with them unless I am getting at least 50% of what I paid back or a free repair.

[peeb]

Seldom. The best you can hope for is a punitive effect on the company.

[FireWire]

I didn't follow the story here.. Is it something related to the fact that 1 GB isn't exactly 1 000 000 000 bytes? If so this is a pretty moronic lawsuit. I bet it was started by the same morons who "invented" the Mebibyte and are "vandalizing" every Wikipedia article to replace the long trusted MB into the unknown MiB.

[reader50]

I checked the settlement agreement to see what Seagate agreed to do, besides the payouts of course.

Originally Posted by Seagate Settlement PDF

5.1. Disclosures. No later than the Effective Date, Seagate shall include language that is substantially similar to the following on Seagate's Website and, after its current packaging supply is depleted, but no later than six (6) months following the Effective Date, on its new product packaging and marketing materials for all Retail Hard Drives:

"1 gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity. Your computer's operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions, and thus will not be available for data storage."

I was hoping for a logjam-breaking agreement, that the drives had to be labeled with binary GBs in addition to any optional decimal size figure. ie:

Seagate Hard Drive
Capacity: 93.132 GB
Capacity (alt): 100 decimalized GB
advisory: 1 decimal GB = approximately .93132 real GBs

If even one major manufacturer broke ranks, and their HDs consistently turned out to be 7% bigger than the other guys, the market would force all of them to use the honest size measurements. Alas, it's business as usual. Minus some $5 checks, and some juicy legal fees.