Quantitative for me!!My SSD Died after three months. It has my Bios on it, which i have copies of and it was easily replaced. At this point, i do not trust them enough to store media from current and ongoing projects, no way.
I consider it the professional sector, because we are people who rely on our equipment to earn a living. I don't care how new the latest and greatest is. An improvement in speed and storage is USELESS if it is unreliable
I consider it the professional sector, because we are people who rely on our equipment to earn a living. I don't care how new the latest and greatest is. An improvement in speed and storage is USELESS if it is unreliable
Apple may retain 1-2 3.5" bays in a revised Mac Pro ( more likely if drop both 5.25" bays). However, a 4 x 3.5" set up would be ignoring several significant factors that already have deep traction.
$/GB perhaps. $/GB/random-IO-Mbps not really. Drop 'speed' and that is closer to being an accurate assessment. The question though is whether one of the Mac Pro's primary duty is bulk storage server.
For example, on Seagate's site:
" ... Switch to 2.5 drives for cost-effective performance
Improve your performance by 15% by switching to Savvio 15K. Additionally, these drives deliver up to 10% faster random reads and up to 8% faster random writes vs. legacy 3.5-inch 15K drives. ... "
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/3-5/cheetah-15k/
There is little quantitative evidence that SSDs are significantly less reliable in general. There are bad SSD models, but there are bad HDD models also. The expectation management has been bad with SSDs. Due to "Solid State" in the name folks expected them to last longer. That hasn't really proven true. Flash wears out and controller/firmware can be problematical in both HDDs and SSDs.
15Krpm 3.5" HDDs introduced over last 12-18 months ? [There are older ones around but since SSDs have gained deeper traction, power efficiency is higher priority, and HDD platter density has gone up the trend is toward 2.5". ]
You are cherry-picking the 3TB capacity threshold. In about 12-18 months there will be 3TB 2.5" drives.
If go back to the era where the current Mac Pro's basic design parameters were form there weren't folks stuffing 3TB of data inside of a Mac Pro. [ e.g., in 2006 4 x 500GB would get you about 2TB total. ] So "pros" needing to deal with 3+TB have been dealing with external storage for a long while. It doesn't disappear now. There is always going to be a subset of the Mac Pro population that needs to use storage outside the box.
3-4 2TB 2.5" drives ends could provie 6-8TB of usable space. It isn't like internal capacity would not be making progress over time.
So they shouldn't skate toward where the puck is going. They should skate to where the puck has been?
The "legacy" sector is probably more accurate adjective than the "professional" sector. Lots of professionals who handle large data sets have been moving to 2.5" drives to handle near-line storage for several years already.