While many are moving to solid-state hard-drives for increased speed in their personal computing, a new method has squeezed more life out of the traditional spinning disk drive.

Hardware company HGST (a subsidiary of Western Digital) has revealed a new variation on the old storage medium, creating a “hermetically sealed, helium hard drive”.

The company has replaced the air in its new hard-drive with helium - the second most abundant element in the universe, which in its gaseous form is seven times lighter than air

The helium means the disks inside create less turbulence when they spin, so that more discs can be packed into less space while also consuming less power.

HGST claims its new design has led to a 23 per cent increase in efficiency, with 50 per cent more capacity crammed into the same space. The relatively simple, entirely mechanical development means the company can fit six terabytes of storage into the standard 3.5-inch hard drive container.

The application of helium to reduce friction is by no means new, in fact a large part of the recent breakthrough has been in the manufacturing processes for an entirely air-tight container.

While the helium drives are probably unnecessary for most home-users, they could be a major step up for data-centres and other large scale digital storage facilities.

Being airtight and therefore watertight the drive could be very useful in “immersion data centres”; wherein computer components are submerged in cooling fluid so that they can be run more intensely with less heat build-up.