Western Digital Ordered to Pay $525 Million To Seagate
A drop in the bucket Western Digital plans to fight on principle, if one can call it that.
The battle between hard driver makers Seagate and Western Digital over misappropriated company secrets has ended somewhat inconclusively on Friday, with arbiters ordering Western Digital to pay 525 million dollars to Seagate. The decision is the capstone to a rough year for Western Digital that included massive flooding in Thailand, where the company produces 60 percent of its drives. WD is thus far refusing to comply with the order, vowing instead to fight the decision in court.
"We do not believe there is any basis in law or fact for the damage award of the arbitrator. We believe the company acted properly at all times," president and CEO John Coyne said in a statement issued to the media, "and we will vigorously challenge the award."
The fight started in 2006, when Seagate moved to sue after a former employee hired by Western Digital allegedly shared "confidential information and trade secrets". The court case was postponed in 2007 when the two parties chose to enter arbitration. With Friday's decision, and Western Digital's vow to fight it, the battle that has already lasted five years is likely to intensify. Though the decision appears to be a stunning loss, Western Digital reported Q3 2011 earnings of nearly 4 billion dollars; their planned 4.3 billion dollar acquisition of Hitachi GST will go forward as planned. Western Digital and Seagate dominate the hard drive market, controlling a respective 32 percent and 31 percent.

Huh, well I do feel kinda stupid cause I read about this previously I just never bothered to think about it.
Upside though Hitachi going 4 years strong, so reliability of Hitachi with epicness of a Western Digital?
ok lame.
anyways screw seagate, WD all the way!!
This is just another example of broken patents / copyright leading to lawyer trolling rather than innovation, like half the other news stories in the tech world.
...and BTW, you guys need to ramp up your SSD line.
great reading between the lines there, want to point to me again where it says seagate sued WD over patent infringement, this is misappropriation of trade secrets, it's the same class of crime as corporate/industrial espionage, remind me again how that relates to patents.....
Not sure if trolling or just retarded.
I can second this. I have a laptop that is 2 years old and went through 2 Seagate Hard Drives, one regular and one performance (7200rpm), and they both died within 6 months. I bought a WD last year and have had no problems as of yet. I also have a WD from my desktop that has lasted 6 years. That desktop also has a Hitachi external drive which is going strong on 3 years, and a Seagate which has been replaced by other Seagate drives 3 times in the last 5 years. However, I still have two Seagate drives from my original Mac Pro G4, 9 years old, and while they have not been under heavy use like the others, the drive is still running strong. Clearly in the past Seagate made good drives, but obviously Seagate needs better quality control today. One consumer should not have to go through 5 drives in 5 years while other brand drives last considerably longer. However this article is on trade secrets, and if WD is guilty, then they deserve to pay the fines. Being a fan one way or another should not influence a court decision like this.
P.S. I have also owned 2 Maxtors, one died the other is still kicking after 7 years, I tend to keep my hard drives until they break. My primary desktop has 4 internal 1 external (varying sizes from 40GB for a system backup to 1TB for my music and videos) and my laptop has 1 internal and 2 externals since they are all around 250GB, which is not enough for me on the go. I have a small collection going, and Seagate recently has dropped the ball on quality control. I do plenty of video editing so my drives do get a lot of heavy use and it tends to test the quality of them. Own no SSD's as of yet but looking this Black Friday for a good deal on an Intel 5 Series