Seagate Technologies filed a lawsuit on Monday in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco against its competitor, STEC Inc, accusing it of patent infringement and seeking unspecified damages. The largest computer hard drive maker alleged that STEC is unlawfully using its patented technologies to create SSDs and other products.

In an interview with Forbes, William Watkins, Seagate’s CEO said: “The public perception has been that solid-state will take over the world and run disk makers out of business, but you can’t bring that product to market without licensing disk drive technology.”

Watkins continued: “STEC infringes on a number of Seagate’s patents which are important to the entire industry. We thought they would have to learn how to do storage differently to avoid our patents, but they decided to go ahead and violate them. It is incredulous [sic],” he said.

STEC officials haven’t responded so far to questions regarding the patent infringement. The company, which is based in Santa Ana, California, develops and markets memory solutions based on Flash memory and DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) technologies.

“We have spent $7 billion over the last 10 years to optimize how our disks work,” said Watkins. “This is the first lawsuit brought by a hard-disk company against a solid-state company. We are protecting the entire industry,” he added.

Seagate CEO announced last year that it is planning on producing its own SSDs. The solid-state drives, which are based on semiconductor technology, accounted for $19 million in 2007, according to iSuppli estimations, The Wall Street Journal reported, but the market is expected to reach over $8.7 by 2012.

Companies such as Dell or Apple have already started to introduce solid-state drives in their systems, and the technology is said to become increasingly popular. One thing that puts SSDs in disadvantage for now is the price, which is around $15 per GB, while traditional drives cost only $0.5 per GB.