Western Digital will replace the air in the hard drive with helium to improve performance.

Most modern hard drives inside the case contain air, which limits the ability of the system to work. The air creates a certain resistance to moving elements, resulting in limited read / write speed. Western Digital is going to replace the air inside the hard disk with helium, which, according to the developers, will increase the price of the hard disk's performance.

The thing is that the density of helium is seven times lower than the density of ordinary air. And the replacement of air with helium can significantly increase the performance of the disk. It is clear that in this case the hard drive case will be tight. Here are some of the benefits of this replacement:
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- disks of the winchester package will be thinner. This means an increase in the number of plates, and this, in turn, will increase the disk capacity by about 26%. In this case, the weight of the "helium" hard disk with seven plates will be equal to the weight of the hard disk with air inside and five plates;

- Lightweight disks of the hard drive package will save energy to ensure the operation of the system. So, experts estimate savings of about 23%. When idle, the usual disk with five plates consumes about 7 watts. The same hard drive with helium and seven plates will consume only five watts;

- "helium" drives will be cheaper than conventional hard drives;

As you can see, at the output we will have new hard drives that are faster, cheaper, lighter, more productive than old hard drives. At the same time, the company claims that it has been working on "helium" hard drives for the last ten years. And the release of the first such models will be held next year. Initially, these drives will be designed for data centers and "cloud" systems. But it is planned to release such disks for ordinary users.

Via dvice