backtop

Print E-mail del.icio.us 52 comment(s) - last by INeedCache.. on Apr 16 at 12:34 AM

  (Source: STEC)

Seagate CEO William D. Watkins  (Source: Seagate)
Seagate prepares for a fight with SSD manufacturers

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins caused a bit of a commotion last month when he stated that he was unimpressed with solid-state drives (SSDs) for notebook computers and that his company would look towards lawsuits if sales of the HDD competitors began to grow. It looks as though Seagate is now going through with its promise to bring forth the lawsuits.

Seagate fired off the first shots on Monday by filing a lawsuit against STEC's SSD products. Seagate, a company deeply entrenched in traditional HDD technology, said that STEC violated four of its patents relating to error correction, memory-backup systems, and storage interfaces with computers.

"Unfortunately, others in our industry have taken shortcuts in the race to innovate, and in the process, we believe they are relying on intellectual property developed or acquired by Seagate to their own benefit," remarked Watkins. "Seagate has not been a particularly litigious company, but we have an obligation to our company and our shareholders to protect what belongs to them."

According to Seagate, it talked to rival SSD manufacturers in an effort to make them license its patents. "They have blatantly decided they don't have to," said Watkins to the Wall Street Journal. "Now is the time to start enforcing our patents."

However, STEC said that no such talks took place and it didn't hear about the patent infringement until the lawsuit was brought forth. STEC VP of marketing and business development Patrick Wilkison stated that Seagate simply feels threatened by the steady progress being made by SSD manufacturers.

"It’s not a big financial issue yet because the market is just taking off," Watkins told the New York Times. "But that’s why we want to set things straight now."

"This is not about stifling innovation or threats to our business," Watkins continued in an open letter. "We have an obligation to our company and our shareholders to protect what belongs to them."

STEC is the first manufacturer of SSDs to be targeted by Seagate, but it appears that it won't be the last. According to iSuppli, the SSD market total just $19M during all of 2007. However, the speedy, shockproof drives are estimated to generate $330M in sales this year and grow to $8.7B by 2012.

Updated 4/15/2008:
STEC released a statement regarding the Seagate lawsuit. Here's a portion from that statement:

STEC is one of the first companies to build SSDs, having designed, manufactured and shipped SSDs as early as 1994, long before any of the suggested patents were issued to Seagate. Given the effect SSDs are having on the HDD market, STEC believes that Seagate's lawsuit is completely without merit and primarily motivated by competitive concerns rather than a desire to protect its intellectual property. STEC believes that Seagate's action is a desperate move to disrupt how aggressively customers are embracing STEC's Zeus-IOPS technology and changing the balance of power in enterprise storage. Seagate is sending a clear signal that it recognizes STEC as the leader in the SSD business and is attempting to slow down part of the growth that STEC is gaining through its SSD offering, particularly in the enterprise segment. STEC will aggressively pursue its defense to this infringement action.

In addition, STEC will also closely examine the patents asserted by Seagate as STEC believes it held such technology including prior patents, dating more than a decade prior to any of Seagate's patents. Although STEC is in the process of analyzing the claims in this lawsuit, STEC believes that Seagate's asserted patents pertain to technologies where STEC has years of prior experience and/or patents. STEC has significant patents related to SSD which have been developed through the decades of experience STEC has with developing, manufacturing and shipping SSDs. Beyond that long history, STEC also believes that many of Seagate's claims are not relevant to SSD. For example, STEC was one of the originators of stacking technology with patents dating back to the mid-1990s, while Seagate's patent on this matter was issued in 2005.

Through this process, STEC will determine if Seagate is misappropriating any of STEC's core technologies; STEC will take appropriate action to protect its interests, including seeking the invalidation of Seagate's patents.

Comments     Threshold


This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled
Seagate HDDs
By InternetGeek on 4/15/2008 2:13:05 AM , Rating: 5
As much as I love a Seagate HDD I wouldn't think it twice to get a SSD that sells for the same price, comparable size and just as good quality... Nothing life-changing there, I just want to store more porn.




RE: Seagate HDDs
By Gul Westfale on 4/15/2008 2:18:02 AM , Rating: 4
i think seagate simply missed the boat on this one and are now suing everyone to try to make up lost ground... but they come out looking like a spoiled child crying for mama because someone else got bigger ice cream cone.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By Oregonian2 on 4/15/2008 5:19:16 PM , Rating: 1
Why? If I were a Seagate stockholder I'd want the head honcho's head to roll if he didn't sue the pants off of competitors who were violating patents held by Seagate. It's his corporate duty to do so (after trying to get revenue by licensing first, of course).

Of course, if he knows his patents aren't valid... uh...


RE: Seagate HDDs
By Oregonian2 on 4/15/2008 5:21:04 PM , Rating: 3
You know, just when I hit "Post Comment" it occurred to me that the lawsuit may only be a ploy to get access to the other company's patents in a cross-licensing settlement. Naw... they wouldn't be that sneaky would they? :-)


RE: Seagate HDDs
By Captain828 on 4/15/08, Rating: 0
RE: Seagate HDDs
By winterspan on 4/15/2008 4:08:34 AM , Rating: 4
Prices for good SSDs are indeed very high -- much more so than HDDs -- but nearly every single technical measures of performance favors SSDS.

Without even taking into account the unreleased Intel/Micron technology that promises a 5x transfer rate improvement over conventional NAND, you can already buy SATA II SSDs from companies like Samsung, BitMicro, MTron, et all that have sustained read AND write performance above the 100MB/sec level, comparing well with high performance 10K RPM HDDs today.

In your average usage scenarios other than large, sustained transfers -- like multiple random reads and writes -- SSDs completely blow away ANY harddrive-based storage.

Now factor in lower power requirements, smaller sizes, no noise, much higher shock and vibration resistance, and higher MTBFs, and it becomes obvious why Seagate is worried.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By Master Kenobi (blog) on 4/15/2008 8:14:39 AM , Rating: 2
SSD's still utterly fail at large data copies. Trying to copy 2+gig to a SSD will result in abysmal speed.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By murphyslabrat on 4/15/2008 2:33:23 PM , Rating: 2
Not necessarily. The only difference is that HDD access is more efficient when dealing with large amounts of coherent data, whereas an SSD doesn't get said benefit. In reality-land, SSD's actually compare more favorably in extended transfer scenarios, as they don't suffer a very large performance degredation. Furthermore, if that "2+gig" is scattered across the sectors of either device, the performance on the HDD will be severely degraded, while the SSD will be almost unaffected.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By FITCamaro on 4/15/2008 9:10:52 AM , Rating: 2
How do you figure SSDs beat traditional hard drives in MTBF when NAND flash has a limited number of read/write operations before failure? Even if it's 100 million read/writes, data is constantly being read/written even when a system is idling.

Sorry but I'll stick to far cheaper and larger capacity traditional drives for a few more years until it's proven that SSDs last and also the prices come down. I'm not going to pay as much for a hard drive as an entire laptop just to get an extra 20 minutes of battery life. And I just don't drop my laptop.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By oab on 4/15/2008 10:30:44 AM , Rating: 3
MTBF (MTTF) is an almost meaningless number anyway outside of warranty companies.

It's not 100million read/writes, it's 100 million WRITES, reads are "free". And it's not 100 million writes total the disk can make, it's 100 million writes per sector, and the disk has automatic write balancing to prolong the life of the disk.

Price per gig is the one of the biggest advantages to sticking with conventional HDDs now, although price for SDD drives will come down to much more "reasonable" levels within a couple years I'm assuming.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By othercents on 4/15/2008 10:33:34 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
I just don't drop my laptop

See that's where the problem is. You are different than most users. Some people at my office have to have their hard drives replaced every 6 - 12 months because of abuse. Solid State drives would keep this from happening.

Other


RE: Seagate HDDs
By murphyslabrat on 4/15/2008 2:45:40 PM , Rating: 2
Currently, one of the largest performance problems in the UMPC market is the HDD. More and more products use the 1.8" form-factor, which results in abysmal performance.

As to the MTBF issue, the way it is computed differs from company to company. I have a friend in a small aeronautics company, and they state their MTBF as half the time till the earliest failure. An MTBF of 1,000,000 hours equates to over 114 years of constant use. Even if it is only half that, or even a tenth, I would sure as hell have a new computer by then; and that is much better than HDD's are doing nowadays.

And I don't want to hear anything about the EEE's SSD's unless you can show me a link to an MTBF rating exceeding 100,000 hours.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By omnicronx on 4/15/2008 11:45:32 AM , Rating: 2
Why does everyone assume Seagate is staying out of the SSD game? If their patents are in use, then STEC should pay the price, regardless of personal feelings. Seagate is not just merely trying to protect their HDD industry, they are also trying to stop competitors from entering the market using their technology, which I believe is perfectly acceptable.

Seagate knows SSD or something similar will be the wave of the future, they are not stupid, they are merely protecting their investments, if STEC wants to license out their technology, they may do so. You don't get to the to by letting others trample over you, if STEC wants to get to the top, they should be doing it the legal way, making a better product using their own technology.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By IcY18 on 4/15/2008 11:56:52 AM , Rating: 2
The timing of this lawsuit i think indicates that Seagate just wants to protect it's patents. If it was malicious they would have waited longer. I would say that i am up-to-date on all technology regarding computers and i have not heard of STEC. So it seems as though Seagate is taking care of this as you normally would and not in a way to intentionally fire shots at SSD development.


RE: Seagate HDDs
By wempa on 4/15/2008 12:35:06 PM , Rating: 2
STEC = Simple Tech

They have been around for a long time. I remember buying their memory cards along with Sandisk cards for the very first digital cameras.


Screw Seagate
By abzillah on 4/15/2008 2:48:46 AM , Rating: 2
I think we should just boycott seagate. If they want to stop progress in technology, we should just stop buying from them, and support other companies that make good hard drives, like western digital, hitachi ect.




RE: Screw Seagate
By Samus on 4/15/2008 4:41:11 AM , Rating: 3
I've purchased two WD's, my first two this century, just because of the statement's Will has made about interupting advancements in SDD. I've owned nothing but Seagate's til not, but the WD GL's are a great innovation.

SDD is clearly the future Will. Eventually having moving parts in a computer is going to be so 21st century.

Get with the times, all your SDD belong to us!


RE: Screw Seagate
By HakonPCA on 4/15/2008 11:50:24 AM , Rating: 4
quote:
all your SDD belong to us!
quote:


lol, its all your SDD ARE belong to us!

Now please someone set us up the bomb


RE: Screw Seagate
By Anosh on 4/15/2008 5:07:41 AM , Rating: 2
And what if his patent statements turn out to be true?

Would you not rather wait for the outcome before you make up your mind?


RE: Screw Seagate
By killerroach on 4/15/2008 9:00:21 AM , Rating: 2
We'll see how valid the claims are from the response of STEC to them... if they think they're particularly valid, expect this whole thing to be s