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.
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No one wants to steal Seagate's secrets anymore because their drives are shit
$525 million should buy a lot of sandbags for the next time the factory gets flooded.
More reason to stick with WD.
WD rulez...
Seagate is not bad, and without them prices would be a lot higher : )
Wait so that explains why I can't ever find the Hitachi terabyte I need for a raid 1.
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?
Seagate is desporate becasue there drives suck. WD had never failed me.
$525 million will be enough to relocate its factories to the Philippines.
Great, by the time the Hitachi 1tb per platter drives are affordable, WDC will have eliminated them from the product line.
Seagate.... Sea... Gate....
ok lame.
anyways screw seagate, WD all the way!!
"LET'S SUE WESTERN DIGITAL, We got nothing better to do anyways, not like there is a flood that we can focus recuperating from..."
I am a WD fanboy, but having friends with Seagate drives they work fine too if you get a top end one. Its called competition, if either of them got crappy the other would start trampling them.
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.
Go WD!!!
...and BTW, you guys need to ramp up your SSD line.
screw wd ! leave the hitachi alone
@Zanny
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.....
From someone that has done computer support for more than 2 decades on desktop, servers and mainly laptops I can say without a doubt I would take and recommend a Seagate over a WD any day of the week. Especially when it comes to laptops.
screw wd ! leave the hitachi alone
Not sure if trolling or just retarded.
From someone that has done computer support for more than 2 decades on desktop, servers and mainly laptops I can say without a doubt I would take and recommend a Seagate over a WD any day of the week. Especially when it comes to laptops.
It's the "2 decades" part that probably instills that opinion in you. Seagate USED to be the top dog. Their quality has gone downhill in my experience. WD Scorpio Black for laptops IMO; without a second thought.
Lol at the top two comments!
It's the "2 decades" part that probably instills that opinion in you. Seagate USED to be the top dog. Their quality has gone downhill in my experience. WD Scorpio Black for laptops IMO; without a second thought.
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
If I owned a company I would not be willing to give a competitor any money unless it was less than the cost of fighting it in court even if it was a "drop in the bucket" but I highly doubt WD's shareholders and employees feel that giving up 525 Mill out of their revenue they earned from people buying their drives instead of their competitors is that moot.
Competition breeds better product but only if they truly compete on the sales floor. Chrysler has been bailed out twice and they still have not made a car I would care to buy. The last Seagate drive I bought that I loved was back in 2001 when they put molded rubber around the drive to help quiet it.
I have never had a problem with a Seagate drive, and I have been running them for close to ten years now.
You all want to know the proof that WD is better than Segate?
. Seagates I would say come in at 2nd(although if you see our harddrive inventory, we have 20 times the amount of wiped WD's vs. seagate), and then Hitachi and Samsung drives are aweful. I won't even talk about Maxtor/Quantum drives. I actually began tossing all of our 20GB drives besides the WD brand, just because I know they're worth wiping vs. watching all the others fail to wipe.
I work for a technology recycling firm. I've gone through and tested THOUSANDS upon thousands of drives with many different brands, wiping each one and making sure they work..guess which branded drive passes the wiping procedure more than any other...WD
Seagate refused to honor a warranty on a failed drive once. I bought a retail drive from a brick and mortar store. But somehow the serial number on the drive came out to be OEM. I called Seagate and the customer service basically called me a liar when I told him this drive has retail packaging and came from a retail store.
Fuck Seagate with a ping pong paddle!!!
Harddrives are iffy from batch to batch. None of us really buys HD bulk so any of us unlucky enough to run into a bad drive will have lasting bad memories of the brand. I'm sure over the millions of drive they make, both are pretty good, even if WD is better.
So this is what they do with the money they got from overpriced hard drives LOL
Another WD supporter here. I've always run WD when I had the choice. they've always been quiet and fast. with the exception of my very very first 2GB WD from the days of pentium 166 non-mmx. I've never had a WD drive fail on me. did i mention they were also fast and quiet? i've also had seagate, IBM and maxtor drives.
couple years ago there was a sale for a 500GB seagate drive, i heard seagate had improved their quality since the days of the AMD K6-II, so i thought i'd give it a try... once i installed it into my computer what i immediately noticed was the considerably higher noise output. when the read/write head was moving it sounded like someone was knocking on the door next door. the drive worked, and the speed was alright... but that noise coming out of it just didn't make me trust it enough to put important data on it. eventually i replaced it with a WD black 1TB, and computed happily ever after.
Seagate refused to honor a warranty on a failed drive once. I bought a retail drive from a brick and mortar store. But somehow the serial number on the drive came out to be OEM. I called Seagate and the customer service basically called me a liar when I told him this drive has retail packaging and came from a retail store.Fuck Seagate with a ping pong paddle!!!
It could be a possibility someone bought that drive, swap with their OEM, reseal and returned it.
And your one of the unlucky ones to have fallen victim. Next time, before opening the HDD out of the anti-static bag, make sure the S/N HDD label matches with the S/N on the retail box. Or you can do is after you pay for it, open in front of them so they won't give you any trouble or saying you're a liar.
I am thinking the real story is that Seagate actually let that employee go over to Western Digital to spy and possibly sabotage the competition. If that new guy actually did have a hand in the direction the tech went maybe he gave them false information...or just enough information to make the drives have a less than reliable lifespan. Also remember that as hard drive capacities increased hard drive failures began to rise because they were pushing the envelope of what they could physically do with platters. Someone with that much know how could have known those limitations and provided just the right combination of advancement mixed with failure in order to turn what was once a reliable tech into a reputation that has turned sour as evidence on this forum.
WD makes superior products, with better visual design and better software...no wonder its winning.
what could the trade secret be? in 2007, was seagate better than wd at anything?