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