Western Digital Corporation

A class action lawsuit claimed that Western Digital Corporation's representations of hard drive storage capacities were misleading and that it overstated its hard disk drives' storage capacities by approximately seven percent. Western Digital uses the decimal definition of GB or gigabyte, where 1 GB equals 1 billion bytes. Other computer operating systems use binary definition, where 1 GB equals 1,073,741,824 bytes. The suit claimed that because of the disparity, consumers could not store as much data as expected. A settlement has been reached that requires Western to give approximately one million purchasers free backup and recovery software with an estimated retail value of $30 each. Also, Western Digital is required to disclose its definition of GB on future packaging. (Jun-27-06) [MARKET WIRE]