[mythtv-users] seagate giving refunds out

Steve Peters - Priority Electronics steve at priorityelectronics.com
Sat Dec 8 01:30:39 UTC 2007



-----Original Message-----
From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org
[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org] On Behalf Of Michael T. Dean
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 4:36 PM
To: Discussion about mythtv
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] seagate giving refunds out


On 12/07/2007 06:35 PM, Brian Wood wrote:
> Steve Peters - Priority Electronics wrote:
>> Looks like 500 true blue gigabytes to me.

It is!

>>  I got one and was not too happy to
>> see only 466GB.

It's 466GiB.  If you use df -h, you'll see GiB.  If you use df -H, you'll
see GB.  If you use Windows, it lies and says 466GB.

>>  That's 12 mpeg-2 hours of recordings on my mythbox that I was 
>> shorted.
>>
>> Not the end of the world, but one might buy the seagate 500GB drive 
>> cause it's $5 cheaper than a western digital one, when in fact the 
>> western digital drive may give you 500GB and not 466GB (just an 
>> example, I don't know if Western Digital is doing the same thing or 
>> not, but that's the idea)
>>     

They all are--because there's a difference between GB and GiB, and the
manufacturers know what it is.  Unfortunately, they're selling to an
uneducated public.

Though, perhaps you should sue Tiger Direct.  They say that the 500GB HDD
can hold 212 two-hour DVD-quality movies.  I don't know how they figure
that, as my DVD movies are about 8GB (though some really old ones are about
4GB).  Even 212 movies/disk * 4GB/movie = 848GB.  (Yeah, the disks can hold
4.7GB, but typically, the movies don't fill the disk completely, and I'm
being extra generous here, just to show how completely wrong it is.)

To get 212 2-hour movies (=414hours) on there, you'd have to fit each hour
in 1.1792GB (=1.1GiB).  To do that at anything near "DVD-quality", you'd
have to use a good MPEG-4 CODEC (and even then, DVD-quality may be
stretching it), which isn't supported by the DVD format, so either they're
inciting the public to break the CSS on DVD's, or they can't do math, or
they're expecting people to create their own DVD-quality
*movies* (they said video for the VHS-quality stuff, so don't tell me you're
creating DVD-quality video with your home camcorder that's not
encrypted--tell me if you're creating actual movies with your home
camcorder), or it's just plain false advertising.  (This time, though, it
really is false--not just a case of uninformed customers who don't
understand the units.)

> Guess we need "unit pricing" as at the supermarkets, with the cost per 
> byte listed.
>   

I'll take 3 bytes, please.  What, you're going to round that up to a penny?
What a rip!  That's a 1,389,004,639 percent markup.

Mike
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So when nautilus says my video file is 3.7GB (3991818240 bytes), is that in
GB or GIB? Either way, it's very deceiving, especially since every file
measurement tool seems to measure stuff in the 1024 scenario vs the 1000
scenario. Also, why does nobody advertisa any product and use a GiB rating?
Ram is sold by the GB, but according to what you said, it's actually sold by
the GiB??? --I get the different ways of measuring stuff, but I just don't
see the need for the 1000 system when the 1024 system seems to be the
defacto standard.
-Steve




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