STEC responds to Seagate patent lawsuit
The company says it will "aggressively" defend itself against Seagate Technology's four patent infringement claims.
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 systems for devices, according to a report in MarketWatch.com.
STEC, which said it has been shipping SSDs as early as 1994, said it plans to review the patents cited in Seagate's claims to determine whether any of its patents had been violated.
"STEC believes it held such technology including prior patents, dating more than a decade prior to any of Seagate's patents," STEC said in its response.
STEC alleges the Seagate lawsuits take aim at its Zeus-IOPS technology, a new line of SSDs targeted toward the enterprise storage market. SSDs competes against hard disk drive technology. Some storage makers like Samsung are looking to straddle both worlds. Samsung has said it has no plans to pit mechanical hard drives against solid-state flash drives.