Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune) [LWN.net]

Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

Posted Mar 19, 2008 18:20 UTC (Wed) by endecotp (guest, #36428)
Parent article: Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

> 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.

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Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up (Fortune)

Posted Mar 19, 2008 19:31 UTC (Wed) by cpm (subscriber, #3554) [Link]

Wholly agreed.

That said, it would be interesting, very interesting I think if Seagate would pursue patent
litigation in such a way as to inhibit the development
of an emerging technology, clearly illustrating how patent law has been
completely turned on it's head.