Lawsuit Over Misleading HDD Sizes Could Introduce the Tebibyte

You know how when you buy a hard drive, the space you get is always less than the space it says on the box? Well, that’s due to the difference between counting space using the binary method, which says that a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, and the decimal method, which calls a megabyte 1,000,000 bytes. It might not seem like much when you’re talking about one MB, but when you buy a terabyte drive you end up losing 100GBs due to the difference. That’s sparked a big ol’ lawsuit, and because of that we might just have a new unit to deal with on HDD boxes: the tebibyte.The stupid-sounding tebibyte (and its little brother, the gibibyte) is the technical term for a TB counted in binary. So you might just see HDDs sold as both terabyte models and tebibyte models, with the tebibyte model having about 10% more storage on board. Or, more likely, the packaging will just get labels that have a confusing disclaimer about the binary method, people will get a $23 check from the class action lawsuit, and that’ll be the end of it. Justice! [CNET via Gadget Labs]