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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.'"
Occasionally I get to thinking that, with 6 billion people coming up with ideas, just because you're the first to send them to the U.S. Patent Office doesn't necessarily mean you're guaranteed the money for those ideas. While people are supposed to do research (including patent research) when inventing, it seems a pain to scour every patent for similarities or places where the patents are so broad, your new invention MIGHT fit into it.
Is it not possible that someone at Samsung came up with the idea before Seagate, but just didn't patent it? Or we could go by the saying: "Ideas are cheap." Just because you dreamed up an invention, why should you get some of the money for all the work put into implementation, marketing, manufacturing, etc?
To answer my own question, I suppose it's because otherwise, no one would report their ideas without a working model and/or contract with a production company in place. They'd never be able to make any money off it as it would be used by someone else if made known. I won't go on about how I feel about the mighty dollar/euro/rupee and how it stifles innovation...
were originally intended to foster progress, cultural riches, innovation
and now they are used as perverse tools to squash progress, stifle innovation, and make us culturally impoverished
not that any of this means there will be a social revolution, but i see the real possibility of a legal revolution. that is, the public simply ignoring the bullshit intellectual property lawyers invent in order to justify their existence
dear intellectual property lawyers: you suck. your entire field is becoming a farce. you write and interpret and enforce law that does not serve society, it only serves your field. i propose a mutiny and jettison of the whole lot of you useless parasites
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can you sue about something so basic? I mean what about the guy that programed the Ramdisk.com DOS program that would let you use RAM as a drive? Why wouldn't that qualify as well?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Quote article one:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Since we're now getting companies suing to prevent advances in the useful arts using powers granted through patent legislation, can we now find that contemporary patent law is a violation of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution?
And, yes, I'm aware that there's a lot of other stuff going on our federal govt. that's probably a violation of the letter and spirit of the constitution.
This sounds like a typical software-related patent issue, as they are talking about the communication between the storage device and the computer. So if they sue, and are successful, then the whole world will be using SSD drives, except for poor old USA, stuck with the mechanical devices.
Now I am pro-patents, but software does not belong in the patent world. This could be the ultimate example of how patents stop innovation and technical progress.
By the way, I wonder how a SSD hard disk is really different from a standard memory card.
It would probably be more profitable, and better for PR, if Seagate held private meetings with the other manufacturers to discuss patents and licensing terms. Explaining the issue and offering reasonable terms would bring them serious cash. Weak threats in a public forum seems a lot less productive, unless of course they don't actually have any patents to stand on.
Developers: We can use your help.
I think you'll see SSD gain huge market share in the next 3 years. Magnetic disks will still prevail where there are huge storage needs through at least the next 5 years, but flash based storage will be cheaper and faster for storage capacities that you need to run your computer normally. I picture Dell selling computers with a 128gb flash based drive, and a 1tb magnetic drive. Laptops will be SSD exclusively.
Whale
Years back, Gigabyte released a RAM based SATA drive - the iRAM. This is why folks were excited about it - just honking fast. It had limitations, however. 4x1G max capacity per drive, used (relatively spendy)DDR1 RAM, and apparently did not work nicely in a RAID-0 config when trying to bump the storage capacity. Still, RAM rather than flash is what I was looking for as a primary OS drive.
... but it never released... (if anyone here knows of such a device, please post or email) Other drives are on the market, but they want 4 figure price tags. I don't get it. For those of us who can deal with having a hard drive that could 'evaporate' if it ran out of juice for one reason or another (disk images)...trading performance for the hassle... why did the DDR2 drives never make it out? Seagate wielding the patent stick would explain much.
The next generation of IRAM fixed my major pain point - allowing dirt cheap DDR2 RAM and allowing 8G max storage per drive.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
... I'd imagine that one way to forestall the inevitable victory of SSD would be more intelligent caching and a larger onboard cache for hard drives... Oh, so the way to fight these IC devices is by adding more IC devices to the spinning disks? Oh, I know! We can slowly phase out the platters, and go to a fully IC device! That'll keep us from going to a fully IC device!Sorry, that fails the logic test. Seems to me that spinning platters are on their way out. Welcome to the solid state world.
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He has a point though, patents aren't encouraging innovation, they're the club companies use to beat each other over the head. Not being aware of infringement of a patent is one thing, waiting for a competitor to use something vaguely similar to something you patented and using that to destroy any competition is quite another. Vague patents that can be applied across all iterations of a technology shouldn't exist for this very reason.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Toshiba preps 128GB solid-state notebook drive -- "While manufacturers plow ahead with notebook-targeted SSDs, questions are arising as to whether they deliver a performance boost significant enough to justify the higher cost."
So...
There's also an issue related to ROI.
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This is just sad. It just screams one thing at me:
If we fail to keep our heads above the water by making good products, we'll sue.
And this time, it's not just some slashdotter seeing ghosts where there may not be any: this is straight from the horse's mouth.
If they think their competitors should not be using certain technologies, they should negotiate with them to come to acceptable agreements. If that fails, they can sue. Threatening to sue if their competitors' products become successful is...evil.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You are right, but the problem is that it can take a lot of money and time to find out if someone is violating your patent. How do you examine the techniques that other companies use to build there products? Or examine each chip in the hdd to see if they are violating some process of your own? There is no point in doing this to a small company or unimportant technology, but when there is a lot of money to be made, suddenly it becomes quite important.
I think you miss the best reason for SSD on laptops. That means with the exception of my fans, the laptop is all solid state. Which means I don't worry as much about moving it around while reading data, or gyroscopic forces. I worry about these things because I don't know excatly how they work, but I 'm sure shaking a spinning disk based drive is bad. And if I don't know, than I will arrogantly (but accurately) say that most people don't know. Hence, selling point.
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There's been a slight fix in recent years. If you wait-and-sue, you may not claim any damages that occurred between your first discovering that the patent was being infringed and your initiation of the suit. That makes this announcement very good news for anyone infringing Seagate's patents, because they can take this article into court in a few years and immediately have any damages between now and the date they received the suit dropped. If they lose, then they will only have to pay damages that occurred after the case started and before today.
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Yeah, personally I'd like to see some actual specific patents rather than a CEO full of hot air making baseless threats. I'm sure Seagate has patents on storage device communication, but this article offers no insight on how SSD makers could be infringing
I think its all hot air or at least is trying to gauge Intel's and Samsung's reaction because he's not threatening some small time business here. Intel probaly had a large team of persons compiling new patents on a daily basis and if push came to shove in court Intel would counter with their own set of patents along with Samsung's team and then Toshiba and IBM might jump in and the proverbial MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) ICBM's filled with patent experts will be landing lawsuits left and right at each others door until only the lawyers are left standing.
So no... Seagate would never want to actually go through with it because they have no idea what patents Intel might have that they could claim that Seagate is currently violating. My hunch is Seagate wants to calm investor fears in the current technology.
After all, even if Seagate won the war, Intel might just start making mother boards or CPU that have lines of code that say:
if $HDD_Manufacture = Seagate { do not boot & give error message "Faulty HDD! contact OEM" }
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Back in the day, if a hard drive failed under warranty, you sent it back (at your expense) waited a week, and then you got a replacement drive in return.
OR
If you needed a drive really fast, the manufacturer would advance ship you a drive (2-3 days instead of a week) if you gave them a credit card number so they could place a hold on the card for the amount of the drive. Then you returned the drive to them in their packaging (again at your expense).
Recently I was surprised to find out that Seagate no longer does advanced exchanges for free - they charge $20 for an advanced exchange. If that doesn't smell like greed, I don't know what does.
YOUR drive failed under YOUR warranty, and now I need to pay for the privilege of an advanced exchange. F.U. Seagate. You used to care about your customers, not any more.
This threat of suing if solid state disks become popular just confirms my belief that Seagate has lost their way. They no longer care about producing the best technology and making their customers happy. Now it's about profit at the expense of everyone else.
Hey Seagate, you may not have heard but there are a few companies in the hard drive business besides you. Those companies will get my (and my company's business) from now on.
-ted
For holding an archive of my gigaton of DVDs?
Exactly the kind of use I had in mind. The huge but very linear datasets where track jumping is minimal that tend to make up the vast bulk of personal storage these days and that will only increase.
OS, software, databases, etc, need low latency to be 'fast'. Bulk multimedia storage doesn't.
I'd go apeshit for a 5TB drive that's quiet, inexpensive and could transfer on the order or 30-40MB/sec.
A 5-10 TB drive would probably be doable today with existing surface density. I dont think you'd lose that much on the transfer rate tho; data rate depends on the surface velocity which remains almost as high due to the increased circumference.
And, yes, I had a bigfoot too. It's not something you want to put your OS on; then again, as noted, flash might be the best thing to put that on whatever you do to disk speed. Personally I have most my OS cached in actual RAM on my workstations in combination with the RAM on my iSCSI storage servers. But it's not that part that causes most issues; it's finding actual space for storing the ever increasing amount of mythtv recordings...
This all assumes that your file system never gets fragmented. But sooner or later it will. We have plenty of throughput if you look at the linear transfer rates (especially since we're running large RAIDs anyway) but after a couple of weeks or months of runtime the drives really start to seek, especially if the end user crammed the system full.
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I agree that the low-end computer market will consist of HDDs for a long time to come. HDDs will not go away as long as they provide cost effectiveness. However, once the next generation drives are out and hit the 5USD/GB mark everyone with a buck will want one especially when their IT friends will be all over them.
I wouldn't be so sure with that. Harddrives are mechanically complicated devices, and that establishes a floor for harddrive prices, as it still costs a certain amount to create all the mechanical bits and put them together, no matter how small of capacity the drive is (you can ask Microsoft about this in regards to the XBox). Flash drives on the other hand, are very simple devices in comparison. Once you get a flash drive large enough to house the OS plus a bit of room left over for cheaper than the cheapest harddrive of any capacity (seems to be about $40-$50 or so), you'll see flash drives start to take over the low end. It'll probably happen fairly soon too, as you can get 16GB of flash for about $50 now if you shop around. Another couple of doublings of capacity for the same price and you'll be there.