Hard disk company Seagate may be trying to retard adoption of solid state disks by suing Stec, the company that supplies EMC with solid state drives.
Seagate alleges that Stec has violated four its patents.
The lawsuit comes after Seagate CEO Bill Watkins told Fortune magazine in March that he thinks SSDs are a poor proposition even for laptop computers, the market in which they are making the fastest inroads.
One market Seagate does, however, see as having potential uses for SSDs Teh Ban Seng, the company’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific Sales and Marketing to searchstorage.com.au in January 2008 that he believes Windows Vista will give impetus to a new hybrid hard drive that combines flash and conventional disk.
Watkins, meanwhile, has written an open letter on Seagate's website in which he claims that "This is not about stifling innovation or threats to our business from solid-state technology." Instead, he wrote, "It would be our preference to avoid costly and distracting lawsuits and to instead pursue constructive commercial partnerships and licensing agreements with others in our industry … however, until the underlying infringement is stopped, it is necessary for us to take all of the required steps, including legal action."
Stec’s statement on the suit says:
"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."
IDC analyst Dave Reinsel said the lawsuit shows that SSDs are for real as an enterprise play. "I can't say who's wrong or who's right in this case, but one thing this does do is validate that SSDs are no longer a niche, and their growth is not just hype," he said.
So why would Seagate go after Stec only? Reinsel said there may be other reasons as well, but "Stec is the one supplying EMC for top tier storage, and they're the first one to really have a viable, reliable solid-state solution adopted by a major storage OEM, which is Seagate's bread and butter."
Seagate has also said it believes Intel and Samsung violate its payments. Speculation suggests that the company has chosen Stec for the lawsuit as it is likely to be less costly than suing the other two companies, with the hope being that a quick judicial affirmation of its patent rights will give Seagate greater leverage in pursuit of its goals.