[Frank Gothmann] "You get an iMac for 2.000 dollars. Then a TB Raid enclosure for 6 drives that will set you back another 1.800 (the same amount of drives you can easily fit into a proper modern workstation), two TB expansion chassis to have 4 pci slots (running at a 25 per cent speed), another box for video io and another one for dual-link ethernet. And possibly another one for..."
More realistically, you buy a Thunderbolt RAID enclosure and a Thunderbolt video I/O interface, and that covers most pro video work. Maybe add a RedRocket in an external Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure if you're working with that format. The Thunderbolt RAID is more expensive than internal storage, but probably cheaper than external SAS storage, and the Thunderbolt video I/O interface is probably the same price as a PCIe card serving a similar function. Either of these devices is far easier to move between machines within a facility, or bring on set, both of which are useful capabilities. And if being used with a laptop, there's a lot of flexibility here. For instance, you can keep your online footage on an external RAID, with offline proxies on your laptop's internal drive. Now you've got a solution that lets you edit sitting in the park if you feel like it, but can turn into a fairly serious online editing machine by plugging in a single cable at your desk.
[Frank Gothmann] "And when I say "modern workstation" I don't mean the current Mac Pro with it's outdated architecture."
Err... current Mac Pros are using Intel's latest. It's not actually Apple's fault (or a signal of neglect on Apple's part) that Intel now seems to update its dual-socket workstation offerings last within a given processor generation. Actually, that's probably Intel responding to some of the same forces that cause people to speculate about Mac Pro cancelation -- high-end towers really are becoming increasingly niche items, and, in particular, dual socket machines are less necessary as the number of cores on each CPU (and general single processor performance) keeps rising.
[Frank Gothmann] "It's a horrid scenario I certainly won't persue. "
You might not "peruse" it, but in five years -- certainly in ten -- I'd be surprised if it weren't just taken completely for granted. Pros used to routinely buy $10K+ systems just to run Photoshop, back in the days when 80 MB was a huge amount of RAM. These days,
phones have way more RAM than that, and this typical Photoshop work is so easy for modern hardware that nobody thinks anything of pros in that field working on laptops. As hardware performance continues to increase, video will inevitably end up in the same place.
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