Another crappy patent troll case: someone started suing hdd manufacturers over acoustic management, claiming (maybe in truth) that they patented the algorithm t

Another crappy patent troll case: someone started suing hdd manufacturers over acoustic management, claiming (maybe in truth) that they patented the algorithm that actually make the hdd head move silently when it is active. The manufacturers proposed as settlement disable the feature being toggleable, and this was accepted. The patent holder never got money, and people never stopped using his patent, they only made users unable to select if theg wanted silent mode or not. A rrsult of this: WD has been for a while making low end WD Black and high end WD Blue with shared mechanics. One model in particular, the WD Black 1TB is almost 100% identical to the blue version. Except it had acoustic management off, while blue had it on. After noise complaints (people even returned hdds thinking it was broken) they made the black have it 100% identical to the blue... but as result despite being now silent, it is 30% slower, slow enough to cause buffer problems for musicians and video editors. (or to make megatexture problematic in id software games). So in the end everyone lost. No money for troll, algorithm is still in use, but consumers now have problems to find the hdd they want (almost no manufacturer advertise the hdd is not silent... so if you need to buy a fast hdd, it is trial and error)