Seagate Technology has announced that they will offer customers who purchased a hard-drive from them in the last five years a cash refund or free back up and recovery software.

The offer came in light of the recent U.S lawsuit which saw two customers sue Seagate because the didn’t get the hard-drive space they were promised on the box.

Michael Lazar and Sarah Cho bought Seagate hard drives in 2005 only to discover that the hard drive had 7 percent less storage capacity than cited on the box.

Cho claimed that Seagate mislead customers by using a decimal definition of the storage capacity term "gigabyte". Sarah said that the phrase 1 GB equals 1 billion bytes, was misleading to consumers as computer operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition of GB, where 1 GB equals 1,073,741,824 bytes.

If the judge agrees to the settlement, consumers who purchased a Seagate hard drive between the March 22, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2006 are entitled to a refund of 5% of the net cost of the hard drive, providing they have the serial number of the hard drive.

Claims for the refund or free back up and recovery software can be made online with this online claim form which Computerworld so happily supplied.