Seagate inflates 12TB helium drives, floats them to IT bods to test

Seagate thinks it can grow and profit from the world's expanding need for storage for reliably increasing exabytes-shipped demand, which flash has no hope of significantly denting in the next five to ten years.

In Seagate's view, the high-capacity disk sweet spot is 8TB over the next few quarters, and it has a cost advantage as its air-filled 8TB drive has fewer heads and platters than WD's 8TB helium-filled drive. Western Digital thinks it will be a 10TB sweet spot instead.