In a class-action lawsuit against hard drive manufacturer Western Digital Corporation, the company agreed to settle and offer any customers who apply to the lawsuit data backup software valued at about $30 as well as pay $500,000 in legal fees and expenses incurred by the prosecuting lawyers.

The class-action lawsuit against Western Digital Corporation involves the way the company reports hard drive capacity. For example, an 80GB model reported by the hard drive manufacturer will only hold 74.4GB of data, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. This is a known fact throughout the storage community and is no news to those of us who have ever bought or used a hard drive.

The reason for the difference in capacity is the way operating system vendors and hard drive manufacturers report the values for storage capacities. OS vendors usually use the binary system for calculating file sizes and drive capacities while hard drive manufacturers like to use the decimal system which makes a drives capacity seem higher on paper than it really is.

Apparently, a lawsuit of the same caliber is pending against Seagate Technology which has been filed by the same lawyers but we have yet to see how that one plays out. We wouldn’t be surprised if the same results came from that case.

For now, owners of Western Digital hard drives purchased between March 22, 2001 and February 15, 2006 can register to claim the backup software at WDC’s website by providing the serial number of the drives they own.