Wilkison believes Seagate is "defending its turf" via this lawsuit.

Yes. That's exactly why we HAVE patent laws.

"promote the kind of cross-licensing and partnerships that have always been part of the hard-drive market."

Except when you "promote it" with a gun to someone's head, it's called extortion.

Seagate could invest time and money into their own SSD technology but that means competitors would still have a leg up on them, so we can't have that. Easier to kill your competitors in the womb than to actually compete in the marketplace, I guess. The IT market loves to eat its own.

Looking towards the future, all the HD companies have to be concerned they're going to end up like Kodak and Polaroid. They've got a couple of years before SSDs are mainstream in mobile applications, 5 or so before the consumer market starts seriously evaporating, and maybe 10 before the market for HDs is strictly servers and media archives. They need to get a strong foothold in the new technology by whatever means they can find.

From what I have read STEC has patents for years on SSD. They have also been making SSD since 1994/95 now, my guess is prior art and old patents will invalidate Seagate's patents and kill the lawsuit.

I also expect a counter suit from STEC in the near future.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080415/stec_lawsuit.html?.v=1

They claim Stec violated 4 patents Seagate registered between 2002 and 2006.
...
Stec said in a statement that it was one of the first companies to build solid-state drivers and shipped its first product in 1994, "long before any of the suggested patents were issued to Seagate."

*edit for typo

USPN 6,404,647 (priority date: Aug 2000)

Could be bad news. It basically describes a form-factor equivalent disk drive replacement using non-volatile memory, without requiring a back-up battery or any of the other methods of RAM-disking with volatile memory that were used in the 1980s and early 1990s. It basically anticipates the use of a technology like NAND Flash to achieve non-volatile disk storage with a slap-in replacement device. Since most advancements in Flash to make this idea realizeable (speed, density, reliability, cost) have only occurred in the past ten years, this patent might survive a prior art challenge.

6,849,480 (priority date: May 1999)

Describes a few specialized ways of stacking SMT chip packages in order to increase density. Don't know what the prior art looks like on this one, but it could apply to some configurations of SSDs, if any of the disclosed methods are being used.

6,336,174 (priority date: Aug 1999)

Describes a memory device that immediately copies data from a volatile to a nonvolatile storage area when a power loss is detected. The technology to make this happen might be applicable to an SSD design that includes a volatile cache memory whose contents are copied back into the non-volatile area during a shutdown routine.

7,042,664 (priority date: Jan 2004)

Describes a method for device-self testing in a disk drive storage device. Some of the claims are specific to mechanical read devices but one claim is set up more generally for any type of storage medium that engages in the disclosed method of running a self-testing routine.

Well at least Seagate is straight forward with it, I can respect that.

*cough* RAMBUS *cough*