Just as Barbara Streisand insisted that she had beautiful hands to make the world forget about her huge nose, some hard drive and SSD manufacturers invent new units of measurement to somehow promote their merchandise.
The story begins when Seagate and Western, who had become the only HDD manufacturers after successive takeovers, realized that they were about to be suffocated by SSD manufacturers. As it turned out, they risked being left alone with their hard drives.
The HDD market has been in continuous decline since the advent of SSDs. Lately, the pace has been accelerating, fueled by the increasing production costs of HDDs and the cheapening of NAND memories. So the two giants have started to pull the last money out of their socks and invest in the SSD business, to keep up with the world around them. It will be difficult for them to be the first, but they also want a slice of the pie, so they are willing to get creative to be noticed again.
And we get to the beautiful hands. Seagate launches a 2TB m2 SSD for enterprise. But because it can't boast speeds as high as the competition, it boasts something else: the SSD's low power consumption. While most manufacturers talk about SSDs with average access speeds of 90,000 IOPS per second, Seagate announces the SSD of 30,000 IOPS… per Watt. So, we don't know how fast it moves, but one thing is for sure: consume little.
A good marketing idea after all.
PS: How about 1TB of cloud storage? (no SSD, no HDD). It's possible, with Office 365. Details are here.