Western Digital Announces World's First 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive (techgage.com)

Deathspawner writes: Western Digital today announced a new, helium-filled enterprise HDD that allows for 10TB capacities without using the SMR method, sticking to industry standard PMR. SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording drives, can not typically be used natively by the OS or disk controllers, and instead often require extra software and/or firmware updates. This makes their broad adoption limited, since the drives are not drop-in replacements for the far more ubiquitous Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR). WD's latest enterprise drive, sold as the HGST Ultrastar He10, uses the PMR storage method, and as such is a full drop-in replacement for any standard hard drive.

Comments

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[tibit]

Purifying helium is not hard: everything else condenses out way before it does. You just blow "dirty" helium over a sufficiently cold heat exchanger, and everything other than helium will condense on the heat exchanger. See e.g. this excellent reference.