I comprehensively covered this earlier in the thread, but it's not just the drive - it's that video format support isn't exactly a guarantee,
What world do you live in that .mp4 and .mpg is not supported. Sure formats may not be supported by all computers: Divx, Windows Media, but this is
and that USB flash drives are signficantly more expensive than a single DVD (and most 32GB flash drives are, at best, at cost parity with a single Blu-Ray disc).
And a bride paying $1500 shouldn't expect a pro to spend a few bucks on a USB drives. Especially when you can buy them in bulk and have them customized? It's whatever the customer wants and like I said before if you absolutely have to have a drive, anyone can get an external one.
Yes, external burners are basically the answer here, but the problem here is that the newer Mac Pro units seem to have quite the laundry list of requirements of external hardware as opposed to even the previous design.
My point again is that laundry list that you speak of is your list. It is not what the trend that Pros are using.
In context, MB = MacBook? I'm not sure, but I'd argue this point regardless. I worked at Staples in 2002, and that is when printers tended to be hybrid, having both parallel and USB ports. So, let's assume that 2002 was the last year that retail printers used parallel ports, and 2003 was the year of USB exclusivity on the printer.
MB = motherboards. As in many MB manufacturers still had printer ports up until the last few years. When was the last time printers were sold with printer ports. I would say a decade ago. Yet they didn't remove the port. And many of them have PS/2 connectors still even though I haven't seen one of those in about a decade.
As for dedicated duplicators, they're great, but they still need an initial burn somewhere. While I know that there are models out there will allow one or more drives to be used directly from the PC, many pros I know did the initial burn from the computer, and then a one-to-many duplication on a standalone unit. I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it, but I am saying that there's still a good reason to have just the bay available.
There is no bay in the new Mac Pro. The design has 0 bays even for a HDD drive. But again if someone needs one, they can get external like they did with floppies.
Blank CDs were $2-$4 each, but 4MB flash drives and CompactFlash cards were $40-$60 each; it was a long time before cost-per-megabyte of USB flash drives were favorable to optical media at the 650MB mark.
I think you are confusing two things here: the original iMac removed the floppy and the USB drive was the replacment for them not CD-RWs. CD-RWs were expensive and the iMac eventually had them but my point was the floppy was removed in favor of the USB drive which was way cheaper than the $40-60 that you are quoting here.
That problem isn't nearly as much of a consideration when a trio of 4TB hard disks can be used as a RAID5 internally.
And how many pros do you know will build and setup a RAID 5 machine as opposed to buying a RAID enclosure that requires little configuration. We are talking creative pros that use a Mac Pro not IT pros.
Yes, archiving will need to be done in some form on a somewhat regular basis, but not on a per-project schedule. You're right that it doesn't lend itself to collaboration well, but collaboration isn't always an endgame, either.
For a Pixar animator that will use a Mac Pro, projects are the normal. For independent pros, moving files around is quite normal.
External hard drives are a bit better of a bargain in those cases, but I'll be honest that I have no idea as to how well Apple supports RAID5 on a set of USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt disks.
Apple doesn't. That's the point of a RAID enclosure: the computers that connect to it don't have to worry about which RAID configuration is being used. People who use Mac Pros don't care what RAID system is being used either.
Earlier, you were suggesting exactly that. Moreover, code gets big, but video gets bigger, faster. I'm sure that many coding projects end up being tens of gigabytes' worth of code and assets, but most of the things I see on Github are not.
I was not suggesting it. You simply misunderstood what I was saying then and you are misunderstanding what I'm saying now. I'm saying that large video projects that in collaboration settings (like Pixar) are checked out, edited, and checked in. Like code. But I am not talking about code when I talk about the Mac Pro. Do some people code with them? Sure but the space issue is for video not code.
I'm talking about the kind of scenario where 8-12TB of available storage is a practical amount to have. Across Apple's product line, external drives seem to be becoming an ever more necessary add-on purchase, while the number of ports into which to plug them is dwindling.
Again this is what a RAID enclosure is for. Also 8-12TB is not workspace storage; it's archival storage.
The original statement made was: "the need to have personal drives only comes from a small percentage of pros".
And in the context of what I said, they don't store everything on their personal computers anymore. They use dedicated servers and external storage for that.
My rebuttal was that if higher amounts of storage weren't that big of a deal to the Apple market, then Apple wouldn't have several square feet of shelf space dedicated to external storage devices, and Promise and friends wouldn't be selling Thunderbolt RAID arrays for a thousand bucks a pop.
Again, the trend is that Pros have been buying these things for years even when the Mac Pro was upgradeable. So Apple seeing this removed the requirement from the new Mac Pro.
256GB of storage is plenty for the Apple users who spend most of their time on Facebook and iTunes and iPhoto, but those are not the users to whom the Mac Pro is marketed.
Again workspace storage != archival storage.
Those for whom the Mac Pro is marketed, should not, in my opinion, be relegated to having to spend several hundred dollars on external storage solutions when PCs at 1/5th the price pack a terabyte as standard equipment with room to grow.
You are aware that the entry level Mac Pro starts at $2K each. And always has been expensive. The high end can run up to $6K. The market that you speak of is spending thousands of dollars for computing power. They will spend hundreds for external storage and for backups. They are pros.
