In a push to increase disk capacity, Western Digital is using a new technology to fill drives with Helium.
The idea is that Helium is less resistant then air, and will allow to increase the number of platters in each drive to 7 (instead of 5) – by doing this each drive will have a larger capacity.
These drives will consume less power and will stay cooler, allowing large hosting companies (think Netflix) to use many of these drives at reduced physical space, less electricity, and less cooling required.
It will be an interesting piece of hardware to recover data from when these drives go bad….
We will keep you posted with recovery options for such drives, as this is a brand new technology.