Thread: Creative Hard Disc Drive MP3 Player Class Action and Proposed Settlement

Grumble Grumble Grumble

This isn't the first time that lawyer happy class action lawsuits like this has been brought up... There was a class action suit against Western Digital a few years back against there advertised hard disk capacity. Most computer O.S. consider a 'KB' (Kilobyte) as 1024 Bytes (2^10 in base 2), and a 'MB' (Megabyte) as 1024 Kilobytes. But on their advertising, their advertised size assume that a 'KB' was 1,000 Bytes and a 'MB' was 1,000,000 Bytes...

In reality, more of the disk space will be 'missed' due to file system overhead. Most removable media is formated in the FAT32 file system. (which has a cluster size of 32K). This means that a file that is only 10 bytes long will take of 32K of disk space (because 32K is the minimum size for the 'parking spaces' on the hard disk). This also means that files larger then 32K are ROUNDED UP to the next 32K block as far as disk space is concerned...

I purchased a brand new 32GB flash drive this week, and I noticed that it can hold only about 30GB of fansub video files. The missing 2GB of space must be the formating overhead of the FAT32 file system installed...

I don't have a box in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that the company who makes these devices specifies everything between the lines. I know when I bought my old mp3 it stated on the box that it could hold 5,000 songs* with a footnote that said that the files were averages at 4min long, etc. People just need to get edumacated before filing a class action lawsuit. I don't blame the companies, they just need to change the way that they advertise.

When it comes to the storage of music files, regardless of what format they are it, its the filesize that kills you.

MP3 player A can hold 5000 songs sure, but at what compression ratio (Which determins filesize)?

This will be thrown out of court.

Thank god Canada has laws against such frivilous things being brought before our legal system