Does Seagate own the patents to the flash hard drive?

Seagate Technology just might have a few patents that make the rest of the storage industry squirm.

Earlier this week, Seagate, the world's largest hard-drive maker, announced that it was suing STEC, alleging that the company violated four of its patents and other intellectual property.

The patents largely revolve around how a manufacturer would take flash memory and make it into a functioning hard drive. Seagate's hard drives store data on magnetic platters. There is more to the drive than the platters, however. Getting the data off of the platters and into a processor requires interfaces, controllers, and other hardware. Seagate's suit essentially states that although STEC might be using flash memory in its drives, the overall construction of its drives infringes on Seagate's patents.

Video: Seagate CEO Bill Watkins looks ahead.
Click the image above to watch.

And this one seems to be the big patent in the bunch: U.S. Patent No. 6,404,647 for a solid-state mass memory storage device. It was filed by Hewlett-Packard in 2000, and the U.S. Patent Office issued it in 2002. Seagate acquired it from HP some years back.

"The present disclosure relates to a solid-state mass memory storage device. More particularly, the disclosure relates to a semiconductor mass memory storage device suitable for disk drive replacement," the patent states.

The full patent is far longer, but that's the gist of it. It appears to describe a solid-state drive that could replace a standard hard drive. Seagate isn't talking a lot about the details of the suit, but CEO Bill Watkins said, "STEC is not the only company we are looking at."

Can a company really patent the concept of a solid-state drive? Determining the scope of patents like this could take years, said Jim Porter, an analyst at Disk/Trends. (We've also only examined it for a while but will do more research and talk to experts. The other patents are Nos. 6,849,480; 6,336,174; and 7,042,664.) Rodine sued a raft of hard-drive makers in the 1990s over its patents for a design for a 3.5-inch drive. The industry eventually went toward 3.25-inch form factors. But the suits were filed, and for a while they sent shivers down the spine of some executives.

Seagate's Bill Watkins says, "Sit down. Have something to eat..."

(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com )

If Seagate decides to broadly press its claims and prevails, the patents collectively could be worth millions. They could entitle Seagate to get a few dollars for every solid-state hard drive shipping out the door from manufacturers worldwide. DVD manufacturers pay around $15 to three sets of patent holders for every DVD player they ship. Philips and Sony reaped millions in royalties for inventing the CD. The Blu-ray Disc/HD DVD war centered on royalties. It's a good business too--you basically wait for the check, once you wade through expensive and hard-fought litigation.

So if the patent is so good why would Seagate go after STEC? To set an example. In the tech world, companies typically don't like to sign license and royalty agreements. Potential licensees often make the patent holder sue one or more companies first. If the potential licensees prevail, the conflict can fade away.

If the patent holder prevails in court, other potential defendants line up to sign deals.

STEC is a small player. If it wins, other industry players will applaud its pluck. If it loses, other manufacturers of flash drives like Intel, Toshiba, and SanDisk might decide to line up dutifully to pay Seagate royalties. And since there may not be a pre-existing lawsuit, there won't be as much bad blood.

"They (Seagate) have always been willing to license," Porter said.

[AnonTip]

more trivial patent examples

So Seagate has a patent basically on the par of a 3-prong to 2-prong electrical outlet adapter.

And now all consumers will suffer for it due to stiffled competition.

Thanks Mr. Patent Office! Once again the consumer public gets to suffer from the moronic judgments of your "experts" who are so stupid they got fired from their day job operating the Slurpee machine and now instead decide the fates of entire industries.

[marccooper]

Scumgate hates America.

You cannot ethically patent something like this. Scum lawyers would let companies patent wiping your a$$ with a bundle of toilet paper several sheets thick in a direction away from your private parts and then charge us all $50 a month for the privilege while racking up billions in legal fees over the dispute. Seagate used to be a semi-respectable company, now they are America hating scum who dont believe in the competitive spirit that makes this country great. I hope that one day history sees the light and everyone involved in these acts of anti-consumer terrorism suffer for their roles. If a giant company doesn't immediately act to enforce a patent when well publicized products use it because it is buried in some giant file cabinet of obvious ideas they somehow got patented and they only dig it up years later, they should have no right to enforce it. If it an obviously possible combination of technology, they should not be able to patent it. This is all horribly dangerous BS because it denies consumers access to affordable innovation and discourages innovation in the sense that there is less incentive to release any product when there could always be an unreasonable patent in some file cabinet that will destroy its profitability. I hate to know that many future advanced like 3D LCDs, LED backlit displays, etc could all be more expensive and less competitive because companies can patent such obvious future directions of technology.

[slickuser]

stop buying seagate hard drives!

yeah!

Then they win the patent suit or not,it doesn't matter!

Their claim just anti-competive!

[guest86]

Agreed!

Buy another special hard drives(Not Seagate) Like Maxtor, Samsung, etc. If hard drives recall, we should move to Flash drives! Please don't forget back your files on CD/DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray now. That are very to backup files on disc before your important files on hard drives are going dead and worst! If hard drive are dead, you lost files and you can't get files back. People will be warned by files will cause happen to lost by hard drives!

We know hard drives have very serious problem call scorpio(Head and write) can cause stuck or freeze sometimes.

Look at annoy hard drive head and write on YouTube website - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMWG3fwiEU

See it? I better backup my files on CD/DVD/Blu-ray right now! I want save all of my files for future to share my friends and family to keep them for many years. Like where we download lot of files from Internet, p2p, websites, we make pictures, copy games, movies, music, etc, etc on Disc for best to save for in future to use. I suggest that.

[marccooper]

Email Seagate, Tell Them You Will Stop Buying Their Drives

Here is the message I sent to their community relations contacts:

To: '[e-mail]'; '[e-mail]'; '[e-mail]'

Previously, I had preferred Seagate products because of their superior value, support, and reliability. I recently read an article that Seagate believes they have a patent on solid state hard drives and has filed an infringement lawsuit. I will no longer be purchasing any Seagate products. I believe these lawsuits based upon trivial patents are extremely harmful to consumers and to the American spirit of innovation.

I will send a similar statement to HP and Dell and encourage others to do the same. These predatory lawsuits are expected from failing no-name companies but I am surprised that Seagate would sacrifice its reputation as a respected market leader to go the way of Rambus.

Thank you for your consideration,

Marc

[xybyrgy]

Prior art?

Legato Systems had something very similar in 1992-3 using SCSI + all of 4MB DRAM + batteries...
EMC would own it now...
I was a beta tester for Legato back then: 6404647 looks really, really weak to me. (IANAL)

[ckought]

How large was a hard drive in 2000?

If the patent was issued in 2000, then wouldn't it pertain to drive sizes of that time? If so, then all the flash drives on the market now would pretty much fall under the definition in the patent.

Unless it stipulates that only flash-based drives that are direct replacements for hard drives on the hard drive bus, then it wouldn't matter if the drive were USB or SD as long as the computer accessed it like it does a normal "hard drive". CF cards are pin-compatible with hard drives, so I?d assume that all CF cards fall under the patent.

This would affect all flash-based MP3 players and iPods. My home router has a built-in flash that it uses like a hard drive ? does that mean they?ll have to start paying Seagate royalties?

This would pretty much be the death of using flash as a file storage medium.

[fgoldstein]

CF is prior artt

CF was introduced in 1994, so it's prior art. So there has to be something novel about the patent or it's void on those grounds.

[blsith]

Prior Art?

The thing is, they are talking about something outside of Compact Flash. They are talking about using a non-USB or PCMCIA interface to talk to the media, specifically how to interface a flash medium using SATA or SCSI interfaces. It may seem a trivial change, but it may be the kicker.

Not saying I like the lawsuit, in fact I believe the current system of patents stifles invention and innovation instead of harboring it.

[TheOrginalNetguru]

Seagate patents.

I am suprised know one noticed that Seagate is incorporated in the Cayman Islands. That means NO corporate taxes. They want US patent protection but they don't want to pay their fair share of corporate taxes. Just another greedy company that will do whatever it takes to make money for their greedy executives.

[as901]

The answer is simple.

All a flash drive maker need do is create their own interface ,and they are home free.

Mark Heinemann

[michael_o]

New obviousness standard

Seagate's lawyers know the standard for what's obvious just changed dramatically and works backwards. Not entirely sure what the lawyers are up to but if they came at me with this I'd offer $1 for a perennial license, or move to invalidate. My guess is the latter will happen anyway. Any knucklehead can see using a new type of mass storage that's cheap and fast could eventually be used as a hard drive. More importantly, hopefully Pres. Obama will replace the head's of the USPTO with people who actually have brains and those new bureaucrats will replace the better part of the organization. The USPTO has become, at best, an embarrassment to the country and at worse a substantive obstacle towards commerce.

[tgonng]

Flash drives in 2000 already available

I'm not sure what is the basis for suing now when there were already many flashdrives in 2000.
We used some 8-32 MB PCMCIA cards as boot drives for a tiny OS and used a SanDisk 256 MB IDE flashdrive with Linux, $350 in Aug 2000, down from $650 in early 2000.

Prices were $1200-$3000 per GB in Aug 2000, which is half of what they were in early 2000.

Sandisk  2.5" IDE 300,000 write/erase cycle limit    4 MB/sec burst speed
price $1100  for an 880 MB flash drive.
This price had just dropped from $1900 to $1100

The biggest from SanDisk was 1.2 GB, $3100   (not a common item like the sizes up to 880 MB, so price is not competitive and had not dropped yet)

MemTech     2.5" flashdrive to 1.5 GB,  2 GB/sec sustained read speed, 8 MB/sec burst transfers
1 million rewrites per block before it wears out
has good error detection
3.5" flashdrive to 3.4 GB,  3.5 MB/sec sustained read speed,          10 MB/sec burst speed

M-Systems FFD
2.5" IDE flashdrive up to 4 GB,  3.5 MB/sec sustained read speed, 16MB/s burst,
44 pin connector

Scsi 3.5" fast flashdrives up to 10 GB, 31 MB/sec sustained read speed
250,000 to 1 million write cycles,  depending on which flash chips are used,
TrueFFS wear leveling and error detection
68 pin or 80 pin connector

http://www.silicontech.com
now known as Simple Technology
flashdrives up to 3 GB,  1.5 MB/sec read speed
$1800 for 1 GB flash card at www.cdw.com
$2700 for 1.8 GB
$4900 for 2.0 GB

tiny rotating hard drives:
toshiba  5 GB   ATA (1-5) UDMA/66 44 pin  $500
shock 200 G operating 2ms,   1000 G non-oper 1 ms

IBM microdrive  1GB  $460  
(format is Compact Flash or type II PCMCIA PC card adapter)
intended to run even less than a 2.5" hard drive.

kingston 2GB PC card  $550

[as901]

This patent is bogus.

To patent a general idea like that would be like someone getting a patent for any device that goes to the moon. This is insanity ,and any judge who agrees with Seagate is insane or corrupt.

Mark Heinemann