Another word, the internal boot drive is proprietary, right? For audio work with instrumentals, i may need huge apple version ssd?
T2 is the default boot drive. In the new Mac Pro chassis the T2 doesn't have to be the only drive.
if looking for low latencies in loading instruments you'd want multiple drives not one big huge one. SSDs allow more consolidation than HDDs but if looking to lower as far a possible down having multiple is better in general.
For example Apple charges $600 to go from an iMac Pro 1TB drive to a 2TB Drive. So ballpark is that they'd charge about $600 to move to a 1TB (from 256GB).
For about the same $600 could get a Intel 900P 480GB optane drive with substantially higher random read performance and very low latencies.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12136/the-intel-optane-ssd-900p-480gb-review/5
The new mac Pro has 2-3 slots that could be used for a Add-in-Card version of this or the newer 905P.
IF all that is needed is "regular" SSD speed then a M.2 host card and some more mainstream M.2 SSDs would be sufficient. Some folks want everything in one humongous volume on the desktop. There is no need to pile up things into one pile ( can but there is no need).
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I probably missed it so, could someone please point me at the documentation saying the boot drive is proprietary
About the Apple T2 Security Chip and T2 Security Overview (pdf) https://www.apple.com/mac/docs/Apple_T2_Security_Chip_Overview.pdf
and that the Mac Pro 7,1 will not boot from any other device.
In the initial "out of the box" state, yes. Permanently? No.
That initial state is improved tamper resistance.
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It is proprietary. It's two flash modules. The T2 that's soldered on the motherboard is the SSD controller. Someone will probably eventually come up with upgrade modules if it's possible or allowed by the controller.
While not impossible, I wouldn't bet on 3rd party solutions for T2 daughter NAND cards. SSD controllers have to set to deal with the specific quirks on the NAND vendor they are coupled to. In the regular world nobody is playing "Mix and match" games with SSD controllers (with a fixed set of firmware) and NAND packages.
What may see is Apple selling them. Or after long extended period of time folks selling harvested ones in a used state ( which would be somewhat sketchy since SSD NAND do wear over time. ) and some "leaks" out of the official Apple supply ( NAND cards "falling off the back of someones truck" and private forward deployed inventory. ).
The Mac Pro will almost certainly boot form any device. If it functions like other Macs with T2, you'll need to boot into recovery mode and enable booting from non-encrypted(or whatever Apple calls it) drives.
Not just boot into recovery mode. Pragmatically, you need to create an account on the hosted macOS image. If jump fresh "out of box" and immediately into recovery mode. Neither is trying to image the system drive fresh out of the box.
[Admins with organization config settings can leverage Apple's Device Enrollment Program and do an "internet recovery" to install/update to some local confing settings, but certain tools are out ( e.g., NetBoot ). ]
This only sounds like big drama to folks to are far, far, far off the normal Mac intial set up target. Take it out of the box, plug it in, login. Done. The T2 wan't be a problem for any of that.
Out the box, it will not boot from non-secure drives. So it's sort of true, but a 5-minute process enables booting from anything.
Out of the box it won't boot from anything other than Internet recovery ( boot off an image from the Apple mothership). It isn't whether the drive is "secure status" or not.
The defaults for
Secure Boot are:
1. Full Security ( for which OS can run. by default only fully validated macOS can run. No Windows. DOS , etc. )
and
2. Disallow external boot ( for which external drives can be booted).
[ we'll see if Apple will put an exception on internal drives. All T2 Macs to this point only have one, and only one, internal drive. They may be adding more options to that boot section of the dialog box. However, in the "fresh out of the box" state the T2 probably won't let those other drives mount it as a operational user drive. Again increased tamper proof. ]
The other confusion really is that these boot restriction and security settings are far more so the firmware doing this and not the T2 itself. One of the T2's primary tasks though is to protect the firmware. So mindsets of "apple's firmware sucks I'll mutation Apple's firmware into my own creation... ... that isn't going to work so well.
Since this is a Mac, Apple restricting it initially to booting as a Mac really shouldn't be "big drama". That isn't out to 'get' the hackintoshes ... whose default initial state really isn't being a Mac.
