Sure, this ain't the first time that Seagate's allegedly
run afoul of the law, but this tale will definitely have you breathlessly demanding more (you know, if patent infringement is exciting to you -- which would actually be pretty weird). Way back in July 2000, Convolve (an
M.I.T. spin-off formed to market the school's hard drive noise reduction research) sued Seagate for using patented tech in its Sound Barrier Technology -- with the end result being that Seagate drives no longer support automatic acoustic management. But
that isn't the exciting part. In a dramatic turn reported by
The New York Times, a former Seagate employee named Paul A. Galloway has apparently provided "an eyewitness account" of what went down, including the theft of info obtained in a meeting between the two companies held in 1998 and 1999 and the destruction of blueprints relating to Convolve's technology. As for the whistleblower, he claims that he was kept in the dark about the nature of the research he was working on, with Seagate even going so far as to take his computer with notes pertinent to the trial. All of this (and more) are detailed in an affidavit that is available (in PDF form) by hitting that source link -- and, man, is it a page-turner!
posted December 29th 2009 4:12PM
Haha this is even worse than the 7200.11 Seagate scandal.
Someone please shut that company down for good now.
They deserve it.
@(Unverified) I agree one hundred percent. We still suffer the consequences of these every other week. These douche bags should be on their way out if were lucky.
@(Unverified)
Well with the "gate" suffix built into the name of the company, it is only natural for it to be scandal ridden.
Never had good luck with their drives anyways.
Judge Judy is the Best
@24inchdubz
better than WD for me... those things die out like flies for me. I still have a 5GB HDD from Seagate that is well over 10 years old and still chugs a long just fine
@wako
I'm going to back you up, I've got an ancient segate, still running fine
@wako
I don't have any experience with Seagate, but I've been using WD drives for years without issue. (This includes both internal and external drives, and a NAS.)
@wako
I have a 1 TB WD that works great and a 250GB seagate external that runs fine as well. As long as it's not Hitachi.
@24inchdubz
Almost lost 500GB of expensive data due to BrickGate's garbage. Never had any problems with Western Digital's HDDs.
Mechanical drives are nearing their end anyway, and the future belongs to SSDs.
@zenomatic
Call me when I can get a 1 TB SDD for $60 and then we'll talk. As long as HDDs offer a cheaper GB to $1 ratio than SDD then they won't be anywhere near done.
@Dafrety
What you are saying is true. SSDs are currently too expensive and limited in capacity to be used for storing capacious data. Fortunately the cost of gigabyte for SSDs is decreasing as SSDs become more widespread and their manufacturing becomes cheaper. SSDs are pefect for laptops and hosting the OS and apps, everything else can be placed on a regular HDD.
Great Pic.
Yawn. In five years nobody will use spinning platter drives anyway. SSDs 4 lyfe.
@mullingit0ver
"SSDs 4 life" and it is the trouble (or part of the trouble), the life of the ssd.
@magallanes it's not like spinning platters are immortal. SSDs can be reasonably expected to live five years, and that puts them in the same territory as platter drives. You shouldn't expect perfect data integrity from either technology.
Loving the pic! hahaha
sour grapes. violating non-disclosure agreement. lawyers win.
@One Love Aren't whistleblowers allowed to violate non-discloure agreements due to the illegal nature of what they are blowing the whistle on.
@One Love
I agree. The only winners out of all this will be the lawyers.
I have 2 of there harddrives, and they run great.. The prices are low to, i hope they don't sued, cause that might bring the prices up...
I have a Seagate 750 GB hard drive and a much older Seagate 18 GB SCSI hard drive.
Both still run, amazingly. I've had more issues with Western Digital and godforsaken Maxtor drives. More drives have failed on me during normal usage under those 2 companies compared to Seagate.
Heck, I still have a Fujitsu 4.3 GB hard drive and it runs better than WD and Maxtor after all these years.
@octoberasian
+1
@octoberasian
Don't get me started on Maxtor. I've had 4 Maxtor drives and none of them lasted much longer than a year. My seagate drive hasn't given me any trouble.
what techology are they talking about? noisy drives??? wouhahaha
this hard drives runs great and quarintina is good
I've been burned by about 20 SATA drives dying on me. it was my first order of computers with SATA (and they were very new on the market), every one of them eventually quit working with read errors. i've not had problems since.... but i think they stopped using seagate...
Hopefully Seagate (BrickGate) goes bankrupt.
/Is waiting for SSD prices to drop
@zenomatic Hey your avatar is my t-shirt lol. I'd love seagate out of the picture, but they are good to at least bring down prices of other manufacturers.
@zenomatic Hey your avatar is my t-shirt lol. I'd love seagate out of the picture, but they are good to at least bring down prices of other manufacturers.
M.I.T. should look up the settlement between Atasi and Seagate. Seagate stole Atasi's technology in 1985/6 the same way as they probably did here. It's a tradition with Seagate - a disreputable corporation - ask around.
Normally, by the time the original patent holders get paid, their company is long dead and Seagate is sailing sans a little pocket change.
Seagate's gonna lose this one...as is HP.
The key here is MIT as co-plaintiff as when-on the rare occasion the Institute sues, it always wins.
Time to sell Seagate short!
Amusing that just about every HDD manufacturer has been commented now as having great product or lousy product. Maybe it's just random luck of the draw. What is the general MTBF for HDD vs SSD? Also I got the impression that in general SSD was still less long term reliable than HDD because of the limited number of rewrite cycles, smart firmware or not. Meanwhile, it amazes me that we hear about so much allegedly illegal/unethical behavior in companies these days. Those of us in the trenches get mandatory annual ethics training but its always the people at the top that break the rules.
@gadgeteer63
Some Seagate (FailGate/BrickGate) models have failure rates as high as 40%, confirmed by a middle-level manager at FailGate.
What comes to SSDs, the new ones are perfectly reliable in the long term. And let's not forget that SSD tech is rapidly evolving.
sounds like boycottin time boys.
@credo
"Convolve has also sued Dell, Hitachi and Western Digital in regard to similar technology. That case is pending in a federal district court in Marshall, Tex."
good luck with that boycott
@long
What does pending litigation have to do with a boycott? In any event, I was actually considering buying 1000 put contracts - but only if I could rally support :/
Interesting about Seagate drives no longer supporting automatic acoustic management. I bought a new Hitachi 2TB drive recently and was dismayed to see that when I went to download the latest version of their config tool, automatic acoustic management support had been removed. I was able to dig up an earlier version of the tool that still supported it and was able to use it to enable the feature on the drive, and when I asked Hitachi multiple times about why AAM had been removed (in case it was linked to increased failure or something) they only responded that their official policy was that users should refrain from enabling it in order to obtain the highest performance from their drives. I had wondered whether a lawsuit settlement had prompted such a removal especially with that kind of response, and this makes me wonder even more if Hitachi simply got sued first for this.
hahaha oh judge judy you crack me up. wonderful, wonderful lady she is.