Just kidding.

The company — formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and now a Western Digital company — has announced a helium-filled hard disk platform, scheduled to ship next year for an undetermined price without specifications, all of which are supposed to be announced when it ships. The technology was demonstrated at a recent Western Digital investor event.

Okay, so why helium? Said the company:

The density of helium is one-seventh that of air, delivering significant advantages to HGST’s sealed-drive platform. The lower density means dramatically less drag force acting on the spinning disk stack so that mechanical power into the motor is substantially reduced. The lower helium density also means that the fluid flow forces buffeting the disks and the arms, which position the heads over the data tracks, are substantially reduced allowing for disks to be placed closer together (i.e., seven disks in the same enclosure) and to place data tracks closer together (i.e., allowing continued scaling in data density). The lower shear forces and more efficient thermal conduction of helium also mean the drive will run cooler and will emit less acoustic noise.

That’s seven platters as opposed to the current five, though HGST didn’t specify how much more dense the data could be nor would this could mean in terms of improved disk capacity. However, storage analyst Tom Coughlin wrote in Forbes that this means “HGST could ship close to 6 TB drives in 2013 and even 10 TB drives with 7 platters could be possible within two years after that.”

The company did say, however, that the helium-filled drive used 23 percent less power, for a 45 percent improvement in watts-per-TB. In addition to consuming less power, the drive operates four degrees Celsius cooler, requiring less cooling in the system rack and data center, the company said.

HGST has been working on the technology — the operative part of which is designing a leakproof case — for six years, before Western Digital bought it in March, 2011, and took possession in March, 2012.

What the companies didn’t mention, however, is how they might deal with a worldwide shortage of helium that is causing a ballooning of the price, literally — helium balloons now cost three times as much as they did just six months ago. As it turns out, the gas is heavily used in the computer industry.

“Helium is usually generated as a byproduct of natural gas mining, and we’re currently in the middle of a shortage of helium, due partly because the recession has slowed natural gas production,” wrote Brad Tuttle in Time. “About three-quarters of the world’s helium is produced in the U.S., according to the Kansas City Star, and while production is supposed to be increased by the end of the year in spots ranging from Wyoming to Russia, the element is expected to be in short supply for months, if not years.”

Here’s several aspects of the good news:

• 13.2% growth in external disk storage factory revenues year over year
• 17.3% growth in open networked disk storage systems
• 13.4% growth in open SAN
• 27.1% growth in NAS
• 23.0% growth in iSCSI SAN
• 12.1% growth in total disk storage systems
• Fifth quarter in a row of double-digit growth
• 46.3% growth in capacity

w00t!

Broken down by vendor, in terms of market share, things haven’t changed much, relatively speaking. In external disk storage, the top five vendors are EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP, and Fujitsu — NetApp and IBM swapped places compared with a year ago. In the total open networked disk storage market, EMC led NetApp. Broken out into components, Open SAN had EMC, IBM, and HP; NAS had EMC and NetApp; and iSCSI SAN had Dell, followed by HP and EMC tied for second. Finally, in worldwide total disk storage factory revenue, we have EMC, HP, IBM, Dell, and NetApp, the same order as a year ago.

There are, however, a couple of interesting points to be made:

• We saw a case of “the rich getting richer.” Generally, the market shares of the top vendors increased, while the market share of “other” decreased.
• The one exception was Dell, which went from 12.7% to 11.4% — and that was *after* IDC started including Compellant in its figures, after the company’s acquisition. Chris Mellor of the Register UK points out that Dell fell completely out of the top 5 in external disk revenues, being replaced by Hitachi, with which it had tied in the previous quarter. In fact, in total revenues, NetApp may overtake Dell in the next quarter, he adds.

Some of HP and EMC’s growth is due to acquisition — in HP’s case , it’s H3C and 3PAR, while in EMC’s case it’s Isilon.

It will be interesting to see how things change in the next quarter.

• With everyone talking about the cloud, will fewer people be buying fewer drives?
• Or will the storage sold to all the cloud vendors make up for it?
• Or, will the Amazon outage send people scrambling to take care of their own storage again?
• What will happen to disk storage sales as flash becomes more popular?
• How might acquisitions in the drive manufacturing space change things in the system space?
• What will happen with Dell?

And what about Naomi?

Didn’t we just hear about this?

In this case, however, it’s not Hitachi GST that’s doing the selling, but Samsung Electronics, which — like Hitachi — was primarily involved in the spinning disk market and had less of a presence in the solid-state disk (SSD) market and would face expensive retooling to support it, according to the article in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that sparked all this.

The potential purchaser? Seagate Technologies, which was leapfrogged by the Western Digital-Hitachi GST merger, which took up almost 50% of the market, according to iSuppli. Seagate accounted for 29% of hard disk drive shipments in the fourth quarter, while Samsung accounted for 10%, iSuppli said. In addition, sales of hard disk drives are down 4% in Q1 compared with Q4, iSuppli said.

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Perhaps Seagate — which considered and rejected a Hitachi purchase itself — didn’t want to miss out a second time. And unlike a Hitachi purchase, which might have courted an antitrust claim, a Samsung purchase would be in the consumer marketplace, rather than the enterprise market Seagate and Hitachi share, according to Jason Mick at DailyTech.

The source for all this? “A person familiar with the matter,” who said the Korean Samsung was hoping for $1.5 billion (compared to the $4.3 billion Hitachi fetched), but might settle for $1 billion.

Seagate itself wouldn’t comment, but Chris Mellor of The Register noted earlier this month, in a piece about Seagate’s earnings, that its chairman and CEO, Stephen Luczo, was spending three months in the Far East, and that the Seagate’s earnings report had noted, “The preliminary results for the fiscal third quarter do not include the impact of any potential new restructuring activities, future mergers, acquisitions, financing, dispositions or other business combinations the company may undertake.”

Samsung, meanwhile, estimated lower earnings earlier this month, and is getting involved in areas far removed from the hard disk business, such as biopharmaceuticals.

The Journal quoted Richard Kugele, an analyst at Needham & Co., as saying “there is really no legitimate alternative” to a sale of the unit to Seagate other than for Samsung to shut it down.

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