Posted on 04/15/2008 10:55:49 PM PDT by Anti-Bubba182
Barely three weeks ago, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins simultaneously pronounced solid state drives (SSDs) to be toys for a niche market and then threatened to start suing people if it appeared that flash-based storage might become a threat to the magnetic storage industry. That date has apparently arrived. Seagate filed suit against US-based STEC today, claiming that the SSD manufacturer is in violation of four patents covering solid-state memory storage, memory backup, and a drive's ability to scan/test itself in order to check for errors.
Watkins has already issued a statement "reassuring" the public that this is simply a case of Seagate moving to protect its unjustly infringed IP. STEC, unsurprisingly, has a somewhat different take on the situation. According to STEC, Seagate has never attempted to open communications regarding any patent infringement. Furthermore, as reported by CNET, STEC believes it can prove Seagate's patents invalid and inapplicable. It's all standard stuff in patent litigation.
The question of whether or not Seagate's patents are legitimate is almost tangential to the larger issue at hand. CEO Watkins can pursue his strategy of innovating through litigation (litivation for short) all he wants, but no amount of patent-derived residual income is going to stop SSDs from making significant inroads into the hard drive market in the years ahead............"
(Excerpt) Read more at arstechnica.com ...
Mass memory does not NEED to spin, it just needs to store digital data for speedy retreival. If Seagate doesn’t get on board and begin innovating and producing solid state storage devices, they will wind up like Smith-Corona.
Remember the typewriter, anybody?
I got a couple in the attic.
Better yet; remember using a match to ‘recover’ a sheet of carbon paper for reuse? ;^)
Patents aren’t always BS, and they do expire. What the US should be guarding against is the awarding of “BS patents” and the manipulation of the patent system similar to the way our copyright system has been manipulated by the music industry.
Fight the Power!
/S
I don't buy that. SSDs are real and have real promise.
SSDs are better for storage in so many ways. They are deployed first on laptops then on desktops and finally servers. In 10 years people will say “remember hard drives?
SD chips were said to max out at 4 gig. Turns out this postage stamp sized chip is already up to 16 gigs with no limit in sight. Moving parts like hard drives are dinosaurs in the making.
Taking out the moving parts has to have potential.
THere was another recent article about a breakthrough in solid state storage technology by IBM that, if it pans out, will make Seagate wish they had pursued replacing hard drives with solid state devices while they held a patent for it.
As IBM learned in the 80s, it never pays to hold off promising technology simply because it damages your core business. If you don’t build it, someone else will. And today IBM would kill to have the market that Microsoft has.
I’m pretty sure some enterprising corporation out of Taiwan/Singapore/China will hop on the SSD bus and proceed to beat the living crap out of Seagate, along with anyone else who wants to protect their old HDD fiefdoms.
SSDs will be a real boon to the laptop manufacturing industry. Just look at the MacBook Air — that’s where the future of laptops are headed.
bttt
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