That's why it has six external storage ports each capable of pushing 20GBps.
Single power supply
Workstation, not server.
Compare this to the dell workstations
Large, noisy, ugly, inefficient uses of power?
Is it just me or something gives me the creeps about running an OS off an external drive...
> Large, noisy, ugly
Since when did the requirements of a workstation class Xeon desktop become "Super-compact" and "beautiful"?!
I would agree on the noise, except no-one has actual heard these things running in a realistic environment so there is currently no comparison.
The parent was talking about having your assets on externals if you had high storage requirements, the OS can live perfectly fine with any number of apps on the SSD.
> Since when did the requirements of a workstation class Xeon desktop become "Super-compact" and "beautiful"?!
We weren't always so utilitarian, Silicon Graphics did gang-buster business for a long time selling style and compactness in the workstation class. Yes, SGI eventually crashed and burned, but Apple is in a far better position to experiment with this, given that they have about $147 billion of cash on hand.
When the company imploded, the CEO who made that decision went to work for Microsoft. I'm not even kidding...
So people do care about form factor, power usage, and acoustics.
EDIT: OK, I suppose you could run it on an external drive.
If you're worried about important data, you'd want to use external storage arrays to store your pictures/videos/genome data. Then your redundancy is handled in individual storage chassis configurations. Promise and LaCie have popular faster-than-a-single-ssd thunderbolt arrays.