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The Most Powerful iMac Pro Now Costs $15,927 (vice.com)
Apple recently updated the upgrade options for the iMac Pro, and getting the very best will cost you. A baseline model will cost you just under $5,000, and maxing out the hardware to absurd heights runs a whopping $15,927. An anonymous reader writes: The most expensive possible upgrade is a $5,200 charge for upgrading the RAM from 32GB to a startling 256GB. Other addons include an additional $700 for a 16GB Radeon video card and $2,400 for a 2.3 Ghz Intel processor with 18 cores. Almost $16,000 is a lot of money for a computer, especially one so overpowered that there are very few reasonable applications of its hardware. Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games, and 32-64GB will take care of most video editing and 3D modeling tasks. With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people.
I saw a comment on a hardware hacking blog a few years ago about a musician who used a repurposed server as his composing workstation. He wrote music for films, TV shows, entertainment and promotional work for a well-paid living.
His workstation/server had four 8-core Xeons so he could composite multiple channels of music in real-time and 512GB of RAM so he could keep several hundred GB of music samples in RAM as he worked. He reckoned the server paid for itself in time saved and delivery-to-customer scheduling with the first two projects. He had used high-end Apple kit before he moved to this solution but nothing out of Cupertino could match what he had built himself.
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
You're looking for a NAS. If an article regarding a $15,000 workstation is at all appealing whatsoever, then having a dedicated storage array is entirely practical for 1/4 of the price.
"But Voyager, they're expensive!"
Let's assume you're a DIY tinkerer. A quick Newegg build on a Ryzen3 with 32GB of ECC RAM, a case, and 5x4TB drives is about $1,350 soup to nuts; in RAIDz2 (RAID6), that's still 12TB of storage with two drives fault tolerance, and I only limited it to 5 because that's the maximum number of drives I could buy at a clip (the build supports three more on the case and the mobo). Do two drive orders and you can hit 24TB before you hit physical limits.
Let's assume you're not a tinkerer and basically want a thing in a box. $1,500 will get you the aforementioned 5 drives and an 8-bay QNAP.
"But network connectivity is slow!"
Add about $400 to the QNAP and $600 to the DIY build and you've got 10-gigabit connectivity, possibly a bit more if you're on a Mac and need a thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter.
"But then I can't access my data when I'm not home!"
The $15,000 Mac won't let you do that. However, all of these systems have some form of remote access, bit it the more arcane SFTP on the DIY build, or the shiny WebUIs and dropbox-like mobile apps of QNAP and Synology.
"But Thunderbolt has lower latency!"
Possibly, but 10GbE over Fiber is pretty damn quick, especially if you do a direct connect to your machine. An 8-bay TB enclosure will cost you $2,000 before you put drives in it, and you get zero options for multi-user or remote access.
"But it's ugly!"
Both Cat6 and fiber cables support long enough runs to put the storage appliance wherever you'd like to hide it. Thunderbolt doesn't. If you're willing to go a bit higher on the DIY front, Lian Li makes some beautiful cases with a price tag to reflect them.
There are countless combinations out there; if storage is your only concern and you've got somewhere to put an 8U rack, QNAP has a rack mounted NAS with a companion storage expander that you could fill with 4TB drives, landing you with 80TB of storage (assuming 4 disk fault tolerance) and *still* spend less than this $15,000 Mac.