This news initially published by Wired has made the headlights of many news and blogs. Thus, I had to dive in and read the paper. This team already disclosed in the past the use of some covert channels such as temperature. Three researchers, GURI M., ZADOV B., and ELOVICI Y. have devised a new way to breach airgap. They use the hard-drive (HDD) LED as a covert channel. By reading from the hard drive with a given sequence, it is possible to control the LED without having to be a privileged user. The reading sequence modulates the emitted light that carries the covert channel.
They experimented with several normal computers and concluded that they were able to reach about 4K bit/s by reading 4KB sectors. Obviously, such throughput does require special equipment to record the blinking LED. Typical video cameras will not allow more than 15 bit/s depending on their frame per second (fps). Do not forget Shannon’s theorem about sampling. 
Thus, they used a photodiode or a specialized amplified light detectors. Only such kind of equipment can guarantee a good detection rate.
Using the HDD reading for a covert channel is not a new method. At Black Hat 2008, FILIOL E. et al. disclosed such attack but they used the clicking of the hard HDD, i.e., acoustic channel, rather than the LED, i.e., optical channel. This is an interesting presentation of many covert channels.
The new attack is nice and adding the drone component guarantees the buzz. Nevertheless, I believe it is not as dangerous as publicized. The issue is the malware itself. The malware has to be the exclusive entity accessing the HDD during the transmission. Indeed, if any concurrent process uses the HDD, it will mess up with the emitted message. Therefore, the researchers recommend turning off the disk caching (drop_caches for Linux). What is the likelihood that an air-gapped computer can run a malware as the exclusive process without being noticed? One of the characteristics of the malware is that it should be stealthy, thus probably not being alone to access the HDD.
The second issue is the synchronization with the spying eyes. The evil maid scenario (or evil drone) does not seem realistic. The malware should execute only during the presence of the spy; else it will be noticed (due to the exclusivity of access to HDD). The spy cannot signal its presence to the malware as the malware is air gapped thus cannot receive any incoming message. Thus, either they have to define in advance some rendez-vous, or the malware has to run repeatedly for a long period, i.e., reducing its stealthiness. If the spying device is “fixed,” using cameras is not realistic due to their low bandwidth, thus requesting the malware to run for long periods. Nevertheless, the spy may have installed special equipment and record everything and analyze later the recorded light and look for the malware sequences when the malware wakes up and plays. The spying device will have to exfiltrate stealthily a far larger message than the covert message, increasing the risk to be detected.
The attack is possible but seems more complex than what is publicized. The paper’s proposed countermeasures disclose the defense:
Another interesting solution is to execute a background process that frequently invokes random read and write operations; that way, the signal generated by the malicious process will get mixed up with a random noise, limiting the attack’s effectiveness.
As already told, I believe that in most cases, more than one process will be executing and accessing the HDD. If you are paranoid, you can always hide the LED. 
Reference:
Guri, Mordechai, Boris Zadov, and Yuval Elovici. “LED-It-GO Leaking a Lot of Data from Air-Gapped Computers via the (Small) Hard Drive LED,” February 2017. http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/system/files/LED-it-GO_0.pdf
Calmette, Vincent, Stephane Vallet, Eric Filiol, and Guy Le Bouter. “Passive and Active Leakage of Secret Data from Non Networked Computer.” Black Hat 2008, Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2008. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228801499_Passive_and_Active_Leakage_of_Secret_Data_from_Non_Networked_Computer