If there's a single truth of Hacker News Apple threads, its that someone will eventually say "no professional would ever..." and then immediately be rebutted by multiple professionals claiming they indeed would "..." and not only would they "...", not doing "..." would be unusual and even undesirable.

Every machine I've worked on, bought or built has had 256 or 500gb. We only run the OS/apps on the main drive. Then a second drive for scratch disk and then SAN/NAS storage for the media. It's VERY normal.

I've found that 256G is 'not quite enough', so my old Macbook has 256G and I moved my media folder to one of those flush-mount microSD card adapters. It's read-mostly so who cares about write cycles?

We only store the OS and apps, so anytime the storage is full it's usually cause someone hasn't emptied their downloads folder or they're incorrectly caching the the OS drive.

My experience in personal use is that data loss with microSD is extremely common, much worse than, say, magnetic disks (and certainly much worse than SSD).

I'm sure you're right, but with a read-mostly workload and backups this is less of an issue.

I mean for one thing I carry a backup of that data with me anyway. It's on my laptop and my phone.

Use industrial cards.

I used think that was the problem too. But then I had this issue with cards that weren't cheap.

Multimedia professionals do not store their data in internal/primary drives.

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.

I'm not entirely sure my Lightroom cache would fit on this drive...

That's what a scratch disk is for

I'm not sure a Mac Pro is the best use-case for Lightroom users, if you're working on something that requires that kind of speed/power you're probably on something like Photo Mechanic Plus and/or Capture One Pro.

Lightroom allows to move the cache on another drive...

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.

I guess the point is for $6000 it should have another drive.

It should, but with a 24MP camera you can create ~50GBs of compressed RAW files per session pretty easily so, a TB of storage won’t do.

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.

Among other things it has, it has a special video decoding card. Some of those in the market go for $3000-$5000 alone.

So I'm a web dev but in a previous role we bought a 2 man company that made medical renders. I ended up making them a mini-SAS Raid 5 made out of SSDs. This is before M.2 started taking off. That thing did 1.1 Gigabyte/sec write on a little table top with terabytes of storage. It was over 20x more than they were used to.

The monitor stand costs $1000 so it still seems like they would splurge a bit on the base built in drive.

You would if you had a storage appliance on a SAN, as the SAN is almost certainly faster than a single SSD.

This is an extremely common setup for video production, so it’s not out of the target market at all.

There are plenty of cheap NVMe SSDs that can push 3.5Gbytes/sec (Samsung 970, Adata XPG). Even with dual 10Gbe NICs, you can't match that, nor the low access times of local storage.

But I do agree that SAN storage is the norm here.

Lots of animation / multimedia houses use workstations with 40Gbps+ adapters (40GbE or Infiniband) connecting to network storage.

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". ;)

It's usually direct-attached storage, not network-attached. They use USB-C or Thunderbolt cables to join to a RAID storage device, and then backup/archive to a network based storage pool later.

I rarely see direct attached storage anymore. It's too cost effective from a media management standpoint to just to right to 10Gbe RJ45 or fiber network storage. The only direct storage I see is if speed is absolutely critical and that's very rare, mostly just high end 3D stuff.

Got it. I'm a few years removed but fast DAS raid boxes for each workstation were common with work product being synced to a network share. Looks like the NICs and SANs are fast enough now to run everything off the network.

We are past that now, new PCIe 4.0 SSDs just have been showcased along with the new AMD chips and they can do 5GBytes/s read and a bit above 4GB/s write (AMD is rumored to have invested in the R&D of the controller). You'd need 40 GbE to match one -- and EPYC Rome, also scheduled for this fall, will have 160 lanes allowing for dozens of them. You could very easily reach 100 GByte/s read which no network will match.

> You could very easily reach 100 GByte/s read which no network will match.

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. ;)

>> You could very easily reach 100 GByte/s read which no network will match.

> 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.

Agreed. Higher end network gear is $$$. :(

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.

The 200 gb/s network adapter that you linked are 4 times slower than 100GB/s. The parent comment wrote explicitly 100 Gbyte/s.

Oops. Didn't spot that, sorry. :)

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. :)

Nah, a motherboard with enough M.2 connectors could easily exist. Or, U.2 or OCuLink. We have already seen 1P EPYC servers with six OCULink connectors...

Sure. My point is just that whatever bandwidth you can do locally, you can also do over the network.

As a sibling comment mentions though... the cost difference would be substantial. :(

Twin ConnectX6 adaptors, gives you 800Gbps, or ~1GB/s, at an absolute theoretical max.

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 ...

If it’s 800 gbps then it’s 100GB/s, not 1...

You're right. Brainfade.

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.

... ~10GB/s can be done by a single 100Gb/s adapter.

More 0's needed? :)

cough 1GB/s can by done by 10GbE.

Maybe a slight typo there? Need to add a few zeros? :)

You're right, doh. See above.

Pcie 3 was not the bottleneck for SSD. They typically are only 4 pcie lanes, when they could go up to 16 for 4x the bandwidth.

But the standard M.2 NVMe interface happens to only have 4 lanes. PCIe4 will double the available bandwidth for these very common SSDs.

The new x570 motherboards will have them soon the pci 4.0 soon

Thunderbolt 3 can beat that though

A typical product aimed at mid-range video producers, the G-Speed Shuttle SSD, can do up to 2800MB/s. That's 32TB of local Thunderbolt 3 attached SSD storage.

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.

Prices have dropped then, cause the G-Speed shuttle I use is 96TB and doesn't cost half that much. I've also used almost every model and in the real world and you don't ever get close to advertised speeds for R/W on those. Plus when the volume gets full it will drop to <100MB/s write.

They are popular though. I see them a lot, but I have had very little success with them over the years.

Thunderbolt 3 basically just provides 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0

I know nothing about SAN, but I'm still surprised that it would be faster than a PCIe connected local SSD?

I'm just speculating here, but I assume that online storage isn't faster, but it may be bigger, online, easier for IT to manage, and fast enough. It also seems likely that some employers are worried about engineers or creatives just walking out with commercially sensitive data.

This. Have a look at the various Linus Tech Tips videos on their ingestion and editing workflow. There's a reason they upgraded their network to 10Gige and it wasn't for fun.

Decent network cards (40GbE, etc) with reasonable network NAS/SAN storage can return data in similar time frames to a local PCIe SSD.

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. :)

40GbE is indeed crazy fast. Didn’t realize that you can have PCIe cards that do this for less than $500.

For a home lab or dev/test gear, where getting stuff off Ebay is an ok thing to do, older Mellanox cards can commonly be found for under $100. Sometimes much cheaper. depending on what the seller is doing. :)

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. :)

Latency will be higher, but throughput can be nearly the same with a fast enough network.

It's more about size and stability.

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.

My OS drive is for the OS and applications I don't care about. 128GB is plenty tbh.

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.

My 2011 Air has 128gb and I'm always having to clean it up to install updates. Yes, it has years of cruft, and some userland stuff, but it's really just a netbook for me, so I don't keep much on it.

I find 256GB fine for writing apps. I think more space would be a waste compared to a faster processor to speed up my compile times. If I had infinite money I'd probably put any additional space on extra drives as a RAID array to help with IO read bottlenecks during compiling since I don't have any use for more.

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.

Most often (depending on the cycle in the SSD tech generation) larger SSDs are faster (see new PCI4 controllers who need a number of NAND chips for best performance). A 256GB has a high probability of being not the best choice for compilation. A 2018 MacRumors thread shows:

    - 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

So this is mostly with write, the iMac Pro I'm writing this on with 1TB is in line with ~2800 MB/s write speed.

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.

Well, I know plenty of developers who opted for the 256GB MacBook Pro models and they're fine with it, myself included. Sure, I'd prefer more storage if I can have it, but I can definitely live with this and still have plenty of space.

Saying no one would buy it is an exaggeration.

I consider myself a professional (at least in that I get paid to do what I do), and I don't think my work hard drive has more than probably 40GB used on it. So 256GB seems like excessively plenty.

I never use the OS drive for storage, and unless its a requirement to run, I dont load apps on the system drive either. I normally have at least 3 drives on my computer. OS/Apps/Data. With imaging software, replacing one piece of the 3 is damn simple, and there is a better chance of ransomware not taking out your data. So I would definitely use and keep the 256GB drive.

A lot of people are disagreeing with you but I certainly concur. Sure, there are ways to work around it, but this is a $6,000 computer and you could get more storage than this in the 2004 iMac.

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.

I am a professional and ironically enough work with big data. 256GB is fine for me.

If you're still relying on local storage in 2019 for development, analytics, video/image work, etc. you are simply doing it wrong

I have petabyte network storage, so don't disparage me my 256 Gb SSD.

Though it is a bit slim if you want to store lots of multimedia or host multiple VMs.

Really? For software? I hardly use 200GB and that's including a lot of extra, personal stuff on my drive.

Or even more accurately, swap "price point" for "profit margin".

Unless these cases are manufactured in remote monasteries, the costs don't add up and price point wasn't a concern.

It's probably there for people who are going to swap out for their own SSD anyways.

I'd buy one in a heartbeat, I don't honestly give a shit what storage comes with the system. I've got a separate, dedicated system for storage that's got all kinds of backup/redundancy/failover/etc. configured.