Western Digital’s first helium-filled six-terabyte hard drive is the most important breakthrough in storage this year. You can talk all you want about the sluggishness or poor reliability of spinning discs, and the awesomeness of solid-state storage, but hard drives are undoubtedly here to stay for a long time to come — and moving forward, I suspect every drive will be helium-filled, thanks to WD’s breakthrough.
Up until now, hard drives have been filled with normal air — 78% nitrogen, 20 0xygen, 2% other gases. We have known for a long, long time (35+ years) that, if we could somehow fill hard drives with a lighter, thinner gas, it would be possible to make hard drives that, due to reduced air resistance, spin faster and consume less power. Somehow, WD (or more accurately its recently acquired Hitachi Global Storage (HGST) subsidiary) has succeeded in hermetically sealing mass-produced hard drives that are filled with helium. We’re not entirely sure how they’ve done this, as helium atoms are tiny and slip through almost any gap, but there you go.
With helium drives now a possibility, we should now expect a very rapid rush towards larger capacities, faster spindle speeds, and reduced power consumption.
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