There's no professional that would buy a machine with 256GB of storage. Let's call it what it is - a throwaway configuration meant to hit a price point.
I mean for one thing I carry a backup of that data with me anyway. It's on my laptop and my phone.
They generally have RAID boxes with either Ethernet or thunderbolt connection.
Most video editing/rendering is done on big storage arrays anyway. So 256GB storage is more than enough for most serious multimedia professionals.
Besides, perhaps you're the user that needs the multi-TB version. Others, e.g. video professionals wont have huge tens-of-TB source files in their main system drive.
If you add a high performance spinning disk its performance won’t be enough and it will be noisy even when idle.
In the end, it’s better to not add anything and let professionals bring their own storage into the mix.
At the end of the day this won’t be sold to new beginners with no files. The buyers will have their resilient storage and the internal drive won’t be used much anyway.
Unless it’s configured as a developer workstation, but it’s generally MacBook Pro’s role.
This is an extremely common setup for video production, so it’s not out of the target market at all.
But I do agree that SAN storage is the norm here.
It's good to see that local storage has finally returned to the reasonable state of being faster than network storage. SATA / SAS was a long, slow period ...
Maybe a slight typo there? Need to add a few zeros? :)
So, even with protocol overhead from all the stack layers chewing up maybe an order of magnitude, that'd still leave 10GBps.
So .. I guess it's still possible, if impractical, to outperform a good PCIe SSD with the latest network interface.
More 0's needed? :)
High end networking gear already has higher throughput:
http://www.mellanox.com/page/ethernet_cards_overview
https://www.servethehome.com/mellanox-connectx-6-brings-200g...
A SAN/NAS using the same PCIe 4.0 SSD's you mention could probably fill the pipes too.
... and it would probably need a bunch of network stack tuning. ;)
That being said, after re-reading the comment they're talking about adding multiple PCIe cards to a box to achieve 100GB/s of local total throughput.
That would be achievable over a network by adding multiple PCIe 200Gb/s network cards too. :)
As a sibling comment mentions though... the cost difference would be substantial. :(
> High end networking gear already has higher throughput:
100GB/s > 200Gbps
You would need 4x 200Gbps ports to reach 100GB/s, so 2x MCX653105A-ECAT (each 2x 16-lanes) at > $700 each, and pay for 1/10th of a ~$30 000 switch, IOW 100GB/s would cost you ~ $4400, before paying for the storage.
Sure, it could be done, but it wouldn't be cheap, and you'll have used most of the PCIe lanes.
EPYC servers (128 PCIe lanes) would probably be the go too, not Xeons.
This is just Imagineering though. ;)
With the specifics, wouldn't it be 4 cards needed? Each card has 2x 100Gb/s ports, so 8 ports in total.
Mind you, you'll pay $15K for it, but if you're in that business you can well afford it even if you're not a top tier Hollywood production shop.
Given that your storage array costs that much, the fully loaded Mac Pro price (somewhere in the $20K range?) is not that outrageous. The people who use Red cameras and G-Tech storage arrays are the Mac Pro demographic Apple is going for here.
Disclaimer: I used to work with G-Tech but no longer there.
They are popular though. I see them a lot, but I have had very little success with them over the years.
It's done this way so people can connect to the storage that's appropriate for the task at hand.
Different projects can be stored on different SAN/NAS arrays , each specc'ed out according to the size/needs of the project.
eg a short run animation doesn't need the same storage capacity of a full length feature film. They may have similar throughput needs though. (Summarising here, but the general concept is ok)
So, lets say someone is a Flame editor (Flame generally has high bandwidth needs). They're working on project A for today. So they connect to the storage being used for that project from their workstation. The next day, they might be working on a different project, so will be connecting to a different set of storage.
Other people using different software will connect to the same storage for their tasks, but can have different latency/throughput needs.
Obviously, this isn't the approach taken by single person multimedia er... "houses". ;)
That's for storage physically located nearby though. eg same building, no more than 1 or two network hops (roughly).
Higher end networking from the last decade or so has become really fast. :)
Looking quickly at the US Ebay just now, here are some older single port ConnectX-2 cards:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mellanox-MHQH19B-XTR-PCI-E-Single-P...
US $23.00 each, free shipping. Note - I don't know the seller at all, this is just from a quick look on Ebay.
There's a tonne of stuff on there. ConnectX-2 is no longer supported by Mellanox, though the cards themselves are generally pretty bullet proof.
Drivers for Linux and FreeBSD come with the OS. :)
Drivers for Windows are a bit more complicated. Mellanox has an archive section with the ConnectX-2 drivers, which work for most people.
Cabling directly between two cards - instead of going via a switch - is pretty common for people just trying out the tech. It lets them plug one card into (say) a FreeNAS server, with the other card in their desktop or workstation. Removes the ~120MB/s limit of 1GbE, assuming any kind of reasonable disks in the connected NAS. :)
If this kind of thing is of interest, probably the best place on the whole internet (not joking) for this stuff is Serve The Homes' Networking forum:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?forums/networking....
Plenty of advice and stuff to read there, and a good place to ask questions from people that have a clue. :)
I can have a 100TB volume for under $10,000 that multiple editors can R/W to over 10GbE. We probably average about 400-600mb/s to a client on a simple setup in real world situations, which is fast enough for a few editors to work on multiple streams depending on the server. It's easier to backup/archive from an IT standpoint.
Most people working solo don't need to access hundreds of TBs though. They're fine with local or thunderbolt attached storage devices.
I really can't imagine this world where "professionals" keep everything on a single drive and are primarily concerned with capacity of that single drive.
My gaming computer has three SSDs, including a 120GB for the OS, and a pair of magnetic drives.
I totally understand gamers need more space, people who collect movies and videos need space, graphic designers need more space. Maybe even Android OS developers need it due to the Android Open Source Project, AOSP, having like 100 repos you need to clone all at once. I don't need it as an app developer, though.
Apple has a history of offering small base storage/memory options, and then charging more for the upgrade versions than they physically cost to produce. It's how they make different price level products when the products are all fundamentally the same. This lets them cater to poorer customers than they could otherwise since the rich ones buy the overpriced upgrades and subsidize the poorer customers' hardware. So it isn't all bad.
- 256 SSD 1400 MB/s Write 2200 MB/S Read
- 512 SSD 1846 MB/s Write 2500 MB/S Read
- 1T SSD 2500 MB/s Write 2600 MB/S Read
- 2T SSD 2600 MB/s Write 2700 MB/S Read
But of course this could be very different with the new iMac which might have a very fast write SSD in the 256 GB model.
Saying no one would buy it is an exaggeration.
I refuse to believe that meticulously emptying out your trash and downloads folder so that you can continue to squeeze by with 256GB is now acceptable for ultra high end, "I don't know a single person who can afford this" computing.
If you're still relying on local storage in 2019 for development, analytics, video/image work, etc. you are simply doing it wrong
Though it is a bit slim if you want to store lots of multimedia or host multiple VMs.
Unless these cases are manufactured in remote monasteries, the costs don't add up and price point wasn't a concern.