seagate

Seagate Technology just might have a few patents that make the rest of the storage industry squirm.

Earlier this week, Seagate, the world's largest hard-drive maker, announced that it was suing STEC, alleging that the company violated four of its patents and other intellectual property.

The patents largely revolve around how a manufacturer would take flash memory and make it into a functioning hard drive. Seagate's hard drives store data on magnetic platters. There is more to the drive than the platters, however. Getting the data off of the platters and into a processor requires interfaces, controllers, and … Read more

Business is slowing a bit in the drive industry.

The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company said it pulled in $3.1 billion in revenue for its third fiscal quarter, which ran from January through March, and $344 million in net income. Net income per share came to 65 cents.

While the figures for the January-March represents an increase in revenue and net income over last year, retail sales of drives and sales into the notebook market in the past three months came in at less than expected, said CEO Bill Watkins in a prepared statement.

The company, however, also lowered … Read more

STEC issued a formal response Tuesday to a patent infringement lawsuit filed by rival storage maker Seagate Technology and its subsidiaries.

STEC, which responded to the lawsuit Seagate filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, says it will "aggressively" defend itself against Seagate's four patent infringement claims and contends it was one of the first companies to develop, manufacture, and ship high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs), predating the patents cited in Seagate's complaint.

Seagate is alleging STEC violated four of its patents relating to its SSDs, memory-backup systems, and self-testing … Read more

Do you want to know the best thing about a notebook with a flash memory drive, rather than a conventional hard drive?

It's the silence.

The notebook I'm testing--a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung--hasn't emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don't require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises.

Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...… Read more

Fifty million hard-drive fans can't be wrong.

Seagate Technology reported second-quarter revenue of $3.4 billion and net income of $403 million, or 73 cents in earnings per share. Excluding one-time charges, net income came to $419 million, or 76 cents in earning per share.

Both revenue and income jumped from the same period a year ago, which ended December 28. A year ago, Seagate reported $3 billion in revenue and $140 million in net income.

Analysts, however, had expected $3.49 billion in revenue and 75 cents in earnings per share excluding one-time costs. So Seagate missed a … Read more

We haven't able to confirm this, but we've heard it now from a couple of people: Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate, is talking to Toshiba and Fujitsu about forming a new company dedicated to hard drives and storage systems.

The new company would combine the limping hard drive divisions of Hitachi and Toshiba as well as some of the storage systems technology from Fujitsu. Each would own a third.

The three-way deal is being proposed as an alternative to a private equity buyout. Hitachi has been in discussions with equity firm Silver Lake and others about spinning off its … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The winner in the Blu-ray and HD DVD war is the hard drive, according to Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate Technology.

"People are saying Blu-ray won the war but who cares? The war is over physical distribution versus electrical distribution, and Blu-ray and HD lost that," he said during a breakfast meeting at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week. "In this, flash memory and hard drives are on the same side. The war is over and the physical guys lost."

Watkins, naturally, speaks from personal interest, but he's got a point. (A former … Read more

Hard-drive manufacturer Seagate has a new series of drives called the Free Agent Series. Just one problem: They won't work with Linux. (Someone in Microsoft's marketing department is smirking at that one.) As the Inquirer writes:

The problem is to do with the power-saving systems on Seagate's latest range of drives and the fact that it is shipped already formatted to NTFS.

The NTFS is only a slight hurdle to Linux users who have a kernel with NTFS writing enabled or can work mkfs. But the "power saving" timer is a real bugger. It will … Read more

Apple is investigating whether or not faulty Seagate hard drives are to blame for data loss on some MacBooks.

Retrodata, a U.K. data recovery firm, reported earlier this year that certain 2.5-inch Seagate drives used in MacBooks had a manufacturing flaw that causes the drive heads to scratch the surface of the drive and cause major problems. InformationWeek contacted Apple about the problem, and a company representative said, "We've received a few reports that some MacBook consumer notebooks may have hard-drive issues, and we're looking into it." An e-mail to the same representative checking … Read more