I've received a few phone calls in my day from concerned computer clients who've thought their brand new hard drive was undersized. "I purchased a 120GB hard drive, but my computer says it's only 112GB!" Here's the explanation that resulted from a lawsuit. Hard drive manufacturers use the decimal megabyte to represent space, while the Windows operating system uses the binary system. A decimal megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes, while a binary megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, which causes a 7% discrepancy.

If you've purchased a Western Digital hard drive between March 22, 2001 and February 15, 2006, you're eligible to receive a free version of its Dantz backup software, valued at $30. Future box labels will also warn consumers of the drive space discrepancy. Claim your free software here.

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