Seagate and STEC Face Off Over SSDs

By Greg McNevin

April 18, 2008: As the solid state disk (SSD) market hots up the knives are coming out, with Seagate claiming SSD manufacturer has infringed on a number of its patents. STEC has now responded saying Seagate’s claims are without merit.

This week STEC announced that it has received notice of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Seagate Technology LLC and Maxtor Corporation alleging that it has infringed on three patents registered in 2002 and 2006.

STEC says that as it was one of the first companies to build SSDs, having designed, manufactured and shipped SSDs as early as 1994 the claim is completely without merit. It also claims that as the SSD market is heating up considerably, Seagate’s is being 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,” writes STEC in an official statement.

STEC says it will aggressively defend itself against the claim, and closely examine the patents asserted by Seagate as STEC believes it holds patents for the technology preceding Seagates by more than a decade.

“Throughout our 18 year history, STEC has been diligent in its pursuit of industry-changing technology while entirely respectful of the intellectual property that has been developed by others. The allegation put forth by Seagate in recently published articles that STEC '...ha(s) stolen (its) patents,' is simply not accurate nor in line with STEC's long history of success and fair play in these markets,” said Manouch Moshayedi, chairman and CEO of STEC.

“In fact, STEC believes these allegations are in response to the competitive threat that we as a leading developer of innovative SSD technologies pose to the HDD industry. We view this action as Seagate's attempt to slow down the growth that STEC's SSD business is experiencing, particularly in the enterprise segment.”

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