Sorry is it just me or does that sound wrong?
With a sealed drive how can it run cooler than a drive constantly having gas changed?
With conventional Heating/cooling you constantly recycle the air to provide more heat or cooling as once cooled/heated air being sucked in and cooled/heated again picks up more chilling or heating. If you constantly suck in fresh air and blow out used air you don't have as efficient heating/cooling as the temperature change is limited to the amount of time that the Air is in contact with the Heating/cooling elements.
With Helium Filled Drives that are sealed the Helium must eventually suck up more of the produced heat and in no way acts to cool the drive. With the increases in Heat that must come with any sealed drive the internal pressure Increases and places more load on the seals sealing the drive which must eventually cause the seals to fail sooner rather than latter and hence the drive fail more often than a drive that holds no internal pressure.
Of course I could be entirely missing the point and they are planning on having large external Helium Reserves and Radiators to cool the drives but that seems much more complicated not to mention Expensive than the current way of keeping the heads away from the platters. Not to mention much more expensive to power which would be a major disadvantage for any Cloud Provider and immediately rule them out for the medium to bigger Cloud Providers.
Yes they currently have a problem and Helium may even solve it for the time being but I just don't buy the spin as things currently stand. Reminds me of the Old Hydraulic Drives we used to have back in the Main Frame Days which where great till they developed a Leak, you then had drive enclosures full of Hydraulic Fluid leaking on the floor or worse still, if you had the covers off the enclosure and made the mistake of running the drive even for a second or two you had a even bigger mess to clean up.
Col
Moderator 
