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.