When Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) made the claim recently that it holds a decent amount of patents related to the solid-state drive (SSD), there were probably some global tech firms cautiously fidgeting in their collective chairs. You see, Seagate is the world's largest hard drive company. Hard drives enable, well, everything from that laptop PC to the TiVo box at home to the classic iPod.

The deal is this, though: most hard drives use spinning platters that really do become a bottleneck in performance within the products those drives are located in. Samsung and other companies have been championing SSDs as a way to remove slower hard drives from products and replace them with computer chip storage devices that have no moving parts, don't heat up as much, use less power and are much faster in performance. That is, unless Seagate has patent claims to much of this platform, which is what it's claiming after buying a patent portfolio from Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ) years ago.

The first company under the gun is STEC, a manufacturer of SSDs. But the question of the hour is this: can one company actually patent the concept of an SSD, now that the technology itself is poised to start competing more heavily with traditional hard drive in everything from laptop PCs to set-top digital video recorders? Hard drives enable the growth of the PC market every quarter as well as a whole slew of other devices consumer snap up like hotcakes. Could Seagate own this universe shortly? It's being mum on its intentions, but if the company wants to become nasty about protecting its patents, it could become an even more powerful force in the storage industry than it already is.

When Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) became the biggest cheerleader for the new SSD (solid state drive) laptop PC, many other companies were waiting to see if the new product would be a success. SSDs are hard drives without moving parts and use computer memory chips to store data instead of a spinning hard drive. One problem is that laptops with the SSD feature cost about $900 more than standard laptop PCs. You can buy an entire extra laptop for that.

Even worse, it seems that the first crop of these PCs is not living up to the hype. The one saving grace is that an SSD-equipped laptop is silent -- but the speed gains and performance that would be the main selling points are just not there. And while Dell has been the largest proponent of the SSD laptop, Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is also taking orders for Mac laptops with SSD drives. Other manufacturers may follow.

Reports state that a "computer manufacturer" is seeing a return rate of SSD-equipped laptop PCs of 20% to 30%. This is due to a high failure rate. Is the $900 price premium just not cutting the mustard? Probably not. The combination of slow performance and outright failure is said to be responsible for the high return rate of SSD laptop PCs, and this is probably not sitting well with Samsung Electronics, which makes the SSD drives inside these laptop PCs. Although nothing is perfect out of the gate, didn't OEMs like Dell and Apple test (and test and test) these newer SSD devices extensively in multiple scenarios before allowing these products to be sold inside their own products? From reading this, that's hard to believe.

MOST NOTEWORTHY: Greenfield Online, Simpson Manufacturing and Cooper Industries were today's noteworthy initiations:

• Merriman assumed coverage of Greenfield Online (NASDAQ:SRVY) with a Buy rating. The firm's sum-of-parts valuation implies 50% upside to the stock and they believe the current valuation does not reflect the fast growing, high margin Comparison Shopping segment.
  
• CIBC initiated Simpson Manufacturing (NYSE:SSD) with a Sector Performer rating and sees near-term earnings risk given the company's exposure to the U.S. housing market.
  
• Cooper Industries (NYSE:CBE) was initiated at UBS with a Buy rating and $58 target. The firm expects Cooper to benefit from positive secular trends in energy efficiency and infrastructure investment.

OTHER INITIATIONS:

• Baird initiated Large/Mid-Cap Banks with an Evenweight view, starting Comerica (NYSE:CMA) and PNC Financial (NYSE:PNC) with Outperform ratings and a $50 target and $75 target, respectively.
  
• Wachovia started Henry Jack & Associates (NASDAQ:JKHY) with a Market Perform rating.

In following the hard drive industry these days, leaders of those companies (Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi) seem to think that there will always be a place for the standard spinning hard drive in most desktop computers, servers and laptop systems. If this statement were true in 2004, is it still true today? Sure -- but the tide is changing, albeit slowly.

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) needs fast access times, less power consumption and no moving parts. The speed and moving parts differences are huge. Although SSD capacities (32 Gigabyte for now) are not near the capacity of a standard 80 or 120 Gigabyte traditional hard drives, there are quite a few advantages.

One is not cost, though, as these smallish 32 Gigabyte drives run off the shelf for $350 (Dell charges $549). But, the signal Dell is giving here is that some customers may prefer these drives, regardless of cost. With more and more laptop computers being sold as "desktop replacements," the only thing not keeping up is the traditional hard drive.

Is Dell poised to one-up the competition with newer (and faster) laptop computer storage devices? Heck, it needs something to kick start sales again after being pummeled by Hewlett-Packard recently. Perhaps this is part of the solution. Now, if Dell can only justify the higher prices of its systems that contain these SSDs, the company may be onto something, eh? Its stock price needs a lift, and to get there, so do its sales.

Platters spinning at 5,400 RPM don't cut the mustard with newer dual-core computer processors and fast RAM. Customers demand more, and if traditional hard drives are lagging, SSD will enter the picture quite rapidly, As it does, prices will fall and companies like Seagate and Western Digital may find themselves a bit surprised.