Suggestion for marketing to further differentiate WD storage products

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Over the years I have bought many Seagate and Western Digital drives.  One thing that shocked me as a 3-decade computer professional, is that Seagate has redefined storage measurements such that 1 Gigabyte is now defined as 1 billion bytes.  This goes against IEEE 100 JEDEC standards, and what the computing industry has used since what, the 1950’s?  All to make their products look competitive, when they aren’t.

So, on the packaging, instead of just listing the capacity (say 1TB), it should also list on a graphic logo, the fact that the capacity is according to JEDEC standards, so something like “1TB JEDEC Standards.”  When consumers look further into the JEDEC standard, they will be forced to compare actual capacity instead of stated capacity.

 

Seagate support, incidentally, sent me this totally misleading chart that lies and tells you that 1000=1024 (that’s right, that’s the math they use).  It actually says “Decimal” in the 1024 column, and “Decimal” in the 1000 column, but tries to convince you with extra and misleading words that these are actually the same.

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/194563en

And then this article which tries to convince you that you didn’t get cheated:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/172191en

So thanks for not trying to cheat your customers, and you should advertise the fact!  Use me as a reference.

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jimerman wrote:

…This goes against IEEE 100 JEDEC standards, and what the computing industry has used since what, the 1950’s?  …sent me this totally misleading chart that lies and tells you that 1000=1024 (that’s right, that’s the math they use).

Err, no.  I don’t think you read carefully.  The whole article you reference is SUPPORTING what you say:   That common use of the term Gigabyte is misleading, and they offer the table to show how different the numbers are.  They are in no way attempting to express an equivalency.  

To further your point, the industry is (slowly) moving to more explicit terms.  

Gigabyte = 1 billion bytes (10^9)

Gibibyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30)

Sources:  National Institute of Standards and Technology,  also IEC 60027, also ISO 80000, etc.

Keep reading the standard you cite;  JEDEC 100 says:

“prefixes are included in the document only to reflect common usage”

It refers to the IEEE/ASTM SI 10-1997 standard as stating, that "** this practice frequently leads to confusion and is deprecated".**

I guess, too, you don’t notice that WD does the same thing.   A 1TB drive is 1 trillion (1^12) bytes, not 2^40 bytes.