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Digital storage is getting larger and cheaper and now Western Digital wants to make it even more efficient than ever. They want to fill their hard drives with helium.

The plates on which the data are stored spin at thousands of revolutions per minute and the air inside the drive limits the number that can be stacked together. WD wants to replace air with helium so it cuts the drag forces right down allowing manufacturers to squeeze more plates inside. All Things D explains what that means:
Deploying 11 petabytes of storage using current drive technology requires 12 racks and 2,880 hard drives, and about 33 kilowatts of power to run them. With the new helium-based technology, you could do it with eight racks and 1,920 individual drives, and run them on 14 kilowatts.
[All Things D Image by lkaestner under Creative Commons license]