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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.'"
we better sue to stop it, FAST!
-- haaz.
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. This is like the crazy patent claims Microsoft made against Linux (what was that? 184 alleged patents? More?) Examples would be nice.
Anyhow, flash prices may be dropping, but I don't see SSDs gaining majority marketshare within the next 5 years. Developers get lazy, cameras get more mega pixels, more people need digital video. Spinning disks are still massively cheaper per GB than SSDs, and unless the price were to drop dramatically, hard disks will still have the edge to keep the throne. Laptops may see SSDs sooner due to power, but 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.
Anyhow, Seagate is worrying about market dominance, and the Seagate CEO makes vague threats that the lawyers at Intel and Samsung probably laughed off. Not that newsworthy in my opinion. Specific patents or litigation would be very notable though.
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
When companies cannot innovate, they litigate. They work hard to slow down the market so that they can catch up.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Seagate sold me 4 of their stupid Maxtorgates (drives from the former maxtor factory) that failed immediately - and most of the replacements ALSO failed immediately.
The won't give me the address to send them the legal notice so I can sue their sorry asses off.
Their Indian tech support said "we can't do that!"
Get me the address - I want to sue on behalf of everyone who bought brand-new drives and had to pay the shipping to get replacements.
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 wonder, if Seagate successfully sued for patent infringements, how much would they actually get? I mean, if the judgment were for $30 million, they may only see $29,296,875 of it.
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
The gap of difference between the ramdisk and SSD is wide enough to say that the 'inventions' are different even though the idea is as vastly different as say the colors on new Honda Accords in the dealer's parking lot. In such cases I am against allowing patents for something that is an extension of existing technology unless the differences are vast. Okay, here is a hard drive interface XYZ. No patent should be allowed on other hard drive interfaces unless they are vastly different, different enough to cause the obsoleting of the previous work, or compete directly with it to split the market.
Have you ever noticed how a lot of new cars look pretty much the same? Hard drive interfaces are a lot like that if you allow anyone to patent minor differences. Oh, but hard drive interface ABC uses blue connectors instead of grey. Minor differences and logical extensions of existing patented inventions are things that make for bs patents. SSD is an enhancement to existing technology, NOT some "OMG, how did they think of that" technology. Back in '92 people were talking about that.
Logical extension of existing things: email on wireless devices, methods to store data on a computer, using RAM to replace the mechanical magnetic materials in hard drives, and on and on
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
We are gonna wait till it's popular, then sue. ----WTF is that, it's greed. Much like Gibson suing everyone and their mom's now that Guitar Hero is a big thing, if you have a right to something, bring it up as soon as it happens, not when you think you can maximize cash. Why is that practice even legal?
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
Those are 2 companies that have VAST patent portfolios, I'm sure. Especially Intel.
I imagine that Seagate is violating some Intel and/or Samsung patents, in one obscure and stupid way or another. Seriously, Seagate doesn't have the juice to take on those 2 companies. Never mind that if Seagate really decides to start some shit with their hard-drive patents, I imagine that IBM will get involved, since they own most of the patents on the basic technology of hard drives. And we all know how IBM deals with people that sue them- they take no prisoners.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Where is Intel in all this? They make the south bridge and MCH chips that talk to SATA drives. Are only Seagate and WD drives allowed to connect to them? Is Intel beholden to patent holders on the SATA interface? Why not connect future drives through USB 2/3 if SATA is patent encumbered?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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).
The enemy of my enemy ... is my friend.
If Seagate pushes hard enough, they may find this out the hard way. They may be an 800lb gorilla in the storage market. But, even a large ape does not like getting stung by a thousand bees, and Seagate is waving a stick around a number of bee hives, in my view of things.
What if, faced with a potential lawsuit from Seagate, we were to see Intel, Samsung, TI, etc., get together and develop a new standard that bypasses Seagate's IP. They could license it to each other for next to nothing... except to Seagate... no soup for you. Sure, they'd like to be safe from a backlash in the spinning media world. But, given the rapid price drops on SSD storage, at some point the SSD media will be "cheap enough" for primary storage and spinning media would be relegated to 2nd tier, archival storage. Intel certainly has the smarts and the fabrication facilities to develop a competitor to anything Seagate might come up with.
Here's an honest question I've been wondering about for a while. Why don't we use GigE or 10GigE to communicate with storage? I imagine there's more overhead than with the currently used protocols, but how much are we talking about here? I'm more of a software than hardware guy, though I know a little about the different layers in the ISO model. *waves hands*. Build in a router on the motherboard, have a port for talking to the outside world and a few ports for talking to storage. Economy of scale and the hardware would be dirt cheap... right? Since it seems like an obvious idea, I'm sure I'm missing something. Would someone who knows these things care to elaborate? Tnx!