Indeed, we're going to see a shortage of helium in the coming years, so this "advancement" (if you can call it that) in the tech is a moot point since it would only make the drives more expensive as helium supplies dwindle. There's also a concern about the availability of rare earth magnets, which are used in hard drives, but that's a whole other topic.

Furthermore, as was again pointed out already in another post, why are we focusing on mechanical drives when we should be working on more reliable and inexpensive forms of flash memory for SSD technology??

If manufacuturers insist on keeping platter drives around, I'd rather see more money and research poured into making the drives more reliable rather than increasing the capacities. Seriously, even with my extensive photo and video collection (trust me,... it's a LOT), it still takes me quite a while to fill up a 2TB drive and I'm only just now considering a 3TB drive as my next backup device. But, when I read the cusomer reviews on some of the world's "best rated" hard drives (consumer level, not enterprise class), I'm appalled by the frequency of DOA drives, or drives that completely fail within the first 3 months of use. The failure rate of drives made by companies like Seagate and Western Digital are unacceptably high as they stand right now.

Seriously, work on making drives BETTER, not bigger.