In last week’s Storage Adviser, I argued in favor of reducing your enterprise storage footprint, championing the energy and space consumption benefits of replacing 3.5-inch “diskosaurs” with SFF (small form factor) drives. Well, it appears the diskosaurs are biting back, as four Seagate 1TB Barracuda ES.2 drives landed in my lab. The 3.5-inch drives, which Seagate will make available next week, are packed with features that remind you why large-form-factor drives still have a significant role to play when capacity and manufacturing flexibility are the major concerns. The new large Barracuda Similarly to other members of the family, this new addition to the Barracuda ES.2 offers both SAS and SATA connectivity. Moreover, the ES.2 can be equipped with dual connectivity, which makes the drive able to remain connected if one controller fails in a two-controllers setting.If you are serious about building some real capacity, I am told that you can take home these megadrives for $300 each, but resellers always have the last say and the additional SAS connectivity will likely make a difference in the price. Anyway, these are not drives for the DIYers, and I suspect that the bulk of shipments will go to array vendors. In fact, with the ES.2 line of Barracuda drives, Seagate gives storage array vendors increased manufacturing flexibility, and this latest addition is no exception. For example, the 1TB ES.2 drive can fit in the same enclosures that mount fast 15,000rpm Cheetah with minimal manufacturing changes, which allows vendors to offer the same box as a fast-performing unit, a mammoth repository, or a combination of the two. Seagate did not say which of its customers will jump first to install the new 1TB drives, so I won’t speculate on any array model, but it’s easy to see how filling all the slots of a 2U 12-drive enclosure will result in an impressive 12TB of nominal capacity that customers can use for Tier 2 or Tier 3 data.At boot, my LSI controller listed 931GB capacity for each Barracuda ES.2 drive, which gave me a total volume well above 2TB, exceeding the reach of conventional MBR formatting. In fact, the resulting volume had to be initialized in my Windows Server 2003 machine as a GPT drive. From my first tests, the Barracuda ES.2 proved not only fast but also — in line with other family members — only moderately thirsty for electricity, requiring a little more than 12 watts per drive when idle, according to my power meter. The lure of going small remains strongDespite the promise of this new entry into the large-form-factor market, don’t expect me to abandon the upside of going small. Actually, the opposite is true, because now I have another example of that trend to look into. Here is why.Xyratex this week announced the SP1224s, a 2U enclosure that mounts 24 2.5-inch drives, a first for the OEM. I don’t have a prototype in my lab yet, but looking at this picture, it’s easy to see that Xyratex provides the same disk density as Infortrend, 12 drives for each rack unit, but does so using a different drive orientation. According to this blowup, the array can mount drives up to 146GB, which amounts to a respectable capacity for a full house, well over 3TB, although minuscule when compared to what 12 1TB Barracudas can provide in the same 2U.And yet, that striking difference in capacity has not changed my mind because it’s unlikely that customers will need the largest capacity and the most extreme performance in the same enclosure. With that in mind, the most energy- and space-efficient approach to storage today is to carefully combine arrays with SFF drives for speed, and arrays with large drives for capacity. Unfortunately, it may take some time for vendors to agree on this simple and perhaps inconvenient truth. Technorati Tags: Storage, drives, small form factor, 2.5″, 3.5″, Seagate, Infortrend, Xyratex, Barracuda, Cheetah, tiered storage, SAS