Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

I started reading the blurb like:
> But in case flash prices continue to plummet and the flash drives really do catch on, 
> Watkins has something else up his sleeve....
"oh, well seagate will start making inexpensive BIG flash drives..."
oh, well...

Gee, and I used to buy a lot of Seagate drives, too.  Guess those days are over.

> patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer

All of which boil down to electrical (or, possibly, optical) signals over a serial or parallel
bus, right?  Makes about as much sense as patents on file formats I suppose, sigh.

Still, there are a _lot_ of existing ways a storage device can communicate with a computer --
SCSI, USB, PATA, SATA, FireWire/1394, etc.  I don't imagine that any patents covering the SCSI
or ATA command set itself are still in force, and many of Seagate's patents may already fall
under various cross-licensing agreements.

Of course, there are some inherent differences between flash and disk, so sooner or later
we'll see interfaces optimized for the former, and disks will have to start emulating flash
rather than vice-versa.  (Think of the various SCSI commands that make no sense if you don't
have rotating platters, moving heads, and the latency thereof.)

I think it would make a lot of sense for flash drive manufacturers to start working with
Microsoft on a new Windows filesystem similar to JFFS2 and enable access to the raw flash in
the drives through some extension to the ATA and SCSI standards.  Linux of course already has
filesystems that handle raw flash.

Surely it would be more efficient to do it that way.

Luckily in the future flash based storage will resemble RAM more than traditional storage, as
far as the interface goes, so bye bye Seagate patents.

Guess they all are evil after all!

> have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates
> with a computer

One of the problems with flash drives is that making them communicate over the protocols used
by hard drives (i.e. IDE, SCSI etc) is a bit of a "square peg, round hole" problem.  Flash
could work better with something a bit different; at the very least, block sizes would be
different and there would be an explicit erase command.  If these patents make it
difficult/expensive for flash drive manufacturers to continue to use the old protocols, then
that might encourage them to do something new - which would be a good thing.

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins announced that Seagate is not going to try and keep up with the
expected increased competition from Flash-based storage vendors.

When asked about continuing to service Seagate's customers in their storage needs, Watkins
noted that "if it isn't hard drives, we don't care what the customer wants". As he gestured
two men in black to approach this reporter, he added with a raised eyebrow: "You do want hard
drives, don't you?"

To the question of whether he was worried some people might not see things his way, he
responded mysteriously that he had "a proposal" for the "mutual benefit" of Seagate and rising
SSD manufacturers. Then Watkins put on his trench coat and started to leave to "take care of
some business". Finally, when pushed on the rumors that Seagate might after all be up to
something aside hard drives, he merely remarked: "Perhaps I will show it to you later".

Let us hope so. For now, our readers will have to remain wondering if the rumors of the
upcoming Seagate cement storage systems are true. All this reporter knows is that another
cement truck is backing up to Seagate HQ right as Watkins is taking his leave.