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One of the hard drives on your editor's workstation is a 7500 rpm "4.5 GB" unit. The actual capacity is 4.25GB. No doubt most of you have noticed similar discrepancies in the past and found them an annoyance, such as when calculating how large to make a particular partition, for instance. According to Reuters, however, this isn't a minor issue for a group of computer users participating in a lawsuit in Los Angeles.

All the major computer manufacturers are named in the suit, including Apple. The plaintiffs are demanding compensation for what they say is deceptive advertising that leaves purchasers with less storage space than they thought they were buying. As lawsuits go, we think this is a rather frivolous waste of human intelligence. However, we do support the idea that hard drive capacities should be plainly stated.

Have you ever wondered where the missing megabytes went?

According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system. The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 18.6 gigabytes of readable capacity, the lawsuit said.

We can't say we really grasp the arcana involved here, but we definitely sympathize with the plaintiffs' point of view. And while we don't think they should get a cent in damages, we do think the computer makers should stop treating customers like children and include the actual capacity of their hard drives in all advertising and promotional material.

In our own experience, we've always noticed the discrepancy, and it's always irritating.