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.