Seagate May Sue if Solid State Disks Get Popular

tero writes "Even though Seagate has announced it will be offering SSD disks of its own in 2008, their CEO Bill Watkins seems to be sending out mixed signals in a recent Fortune interview 'He's convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel (INTC) are violating Seagate's patents. (An Intel spokeswoman says the company doesn't comment on speculation.) Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), two of the major hard drive makers, have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer, Watkins says. It stands to reason that sooner or later, Seagate will sue — particularly if it looks like SSDs could become a real threat.'"

Comments

Re:Give me the f*cking address

[Coopjust]

It's part of the warranty terms with the shipping.

Anyhow, the address is: 920 Disc Dr
Scotts Valley, CA 95066-4544


Disc Drive. Ugh.

Confusion

[TheNinjaroach]

So seagate, are they violating your patent? If so, proof please, if not, you yield all rights in case they are found to at a later date I think you may be confusing patents with trademarks. Trademarks must be actively defended, where I believe patents on the other hand can be sat on for awhile.

So what about solid state disks 20 yrs ago?

[Anonymous Coward]

DEC sold a line of solid state disks somewhere around 20 years ago, for which they probably had
patents but by now these will be expired. (They used the rejects from memory fabs, which they
called "the skim milk of the crop", and worked around all the bad bits to get usable memory that
was cheap enough to use.) Certainly one can use similar techniques to theirs (likely today with
better memory) and make solid state disks. No way Seagate or anyone else could patent that (once the
old technology was pointed out).

Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over

[Cecil]

The specs on the latest Samsung SSD (if accurate) beat out the fastest magnetic media you can buy: 100MB/Sec read, 80MB/sec write.

Not really true. Seagate's Cheetah 15K.5 300GB, being (last I checked) the fastest magnetic media you can buy, can easily beat that. It peaks at 135MB/sec. Some other 15,000 rpm drives can post comparable numbers.

I still agree with your post in general, but that specific statement is untrue.