The hard drive and its race for capacity never seems to end. While many believed that the classic hard drive had reached its maximum storage capacity and would gradually fade away in the face of SSD drives, new technologies are emerging to increase capacity and improve their overall characteristics, including transfer speed.
A few months after Western Digital announced the release of a 10 TB helium hard drive, its direct competitor Seagate soon followed suit with its own model.
(As a reminder, the first helium hard drive was launched in 2013 by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, with a capacity of 6 TB at the time)
Helium being less dense than air, it brings improvements on many levels.
It allows for reduced friction in the read head movements as well as improved platter rotation.
Among the improvements are reduced power consumption and reduced heat emitted by the hard drive. And as data recovery experts at Chronodisk, we know that the hotter a hard drive runs, the shorter its lifespan will be. Numerous Seagate drive series have confirmed this now near-infallible rule in recent years.
Thanks to the reduced friction, the gap between platters is reduced, allowing more platters to fit inside the metal casing… This in turn improves the hard drive’s storage capacity.
Finally, because these hard drives are hermetically sealed to retain the helium, humidity is reduced and external contaminants are significantly decreased as well. It’s worth noting that in a classic hard drive, ambient room air circulates inside through a synthetic fiber filter, allowing fine dust particles to pass through, which over time damage the read heads and, more critically, the magnetic ferrous coating of the platters.
Below are the visible differences between a “classic” hard drive and a helium model
The 10TB helium hard drive makes data recovery more difficult
These helium hard drives are much more expensive but allow for far more intensive operating conditions. They are very costly and therefore target a highly specific professional audience such as data centers, major web players (such as website hosting providers, for example) and other large organizations.
On the MacWay website, these helium hard drives can be found for around €700 for an 8 TB capacity.
A special note regarding our activity: as with any recent technology, our lab has so far handled very few cases involving these drives. Naturally, thanks to helium, the reduced friction between components should give these extreme-performance hard drives an exceptional lifespan. However, we don’t yet have enough hindsight to assess the actual reliability gain, or to know whether the price difference compared to a classic hard drive or an SSD is justified. Unlike SSDs, helium drives remain just as vulnerable to shocks — or even micro-shocks — as a classic hard drive.
Let’s be clear: data recovery in the event of a helium drive failure is considerably more costly and labor-intensive! Beyond the standard cleanroom equipment, it requires highly specific tools just to open the drive’s cover: this must be done using a micro-milling tool all around the drive’s metal casing, which generates a considerable amount of dust… and in a cleanroom where dust is the enemy, that’s far from ideal. Once the drive is opened and the helium has dissipated… things get even more complicated, as the narrow gap between each platter makes the operation far more perilous! Any tremor from the operator while extracting the read heads must be strictly avoided, or the result is guaranteed disaster.