Welcome to a brave new world, one with two very distinct storage mediums which, in some ways, are no longer actually competing for the same buyers. On one hand we have the SSD, an ultra fast storage format which has no problem featuring titanic throughput numbers but has historically struggled to deliver those numbers at affordable price points in the capacities today's users require. In corner number two there's the traditional hard drive; it can trump SSDs in the price per gigabyte category but performance just can't compete.

Alongside the obvious performance-driven challenges, HDD manufacturers have also hit up against two other walls: one which limited platter density and the other which is a rather large but still spatially-constrained 3.5? form factor. In order to leap ahead in both those respects, Western Digital's new RED 8TB's platters are filled with helium and then sealed.