Furthermore, new approach allows reducing platter’s thickness and increase record density on them, which means increasing the number of platters to seven without increasing drive’s weight. As a result, drive’s capacity can be increased by 40%. It allows designing models with capacity of at least 5,6 TB. At the same time hard disk speed remains 7200 RPM. However, in theory, using helium can allow set up production of cheap models with hard disk speed of 10000 RPM and above. Today such disks already exist but their price is quite high even at small volumes.

Helium model was designed by WD affiliate company Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST). Bulk production of this novelty product will start this year. It is expected that the cost of helium-filled hard disk will not differ from ordinary models or will be even slightly cheaper. As far as cost of information storage is concerned, it will definitely be lower.

Similar know-how show that despite victorious march of SSD, it is still too early to write off traditional storage devices into history dump, emergence of such technologies can delay this process for decades.

“Manufacturers working in hard disk industry have been trying for a decade to accomplish something similar”, — argues Brendan Collins, Vice-President Product Marketing HGST, — “However, only we so far patented a technology allowing mass production of such disks. We think that within the next 10 years this design will be used in cloud storages and data centres as main storage device”.
Mr. Collins explained that the most difficult part in creating new storage device was to ensure proper air-tightness to avoid helium leakage. Speaking of which, increased air-tightness means that new disks can be used in more severe environment than in the case of ordinary models. Moreover, they can easily operate under temperatures that are 5 degrees lower.

Another recall, during 90-s of the previous century it was a common perception that hard disk drives contain inert gas inside. This is what we witness only now…