To be fair, if you're the person that the mac pro is aimed at and you can drop $3k on a machine, another 1.5 for a decent drive array isn't that outlandish.
The cheapest 2TB drive I'd be willing to buy is this one [1]. Disregarding the "NAS Drive!!!" marketing junk, if you sort disk drives by price on Newegg this is the first one with a 5 star rating from 31 reviews.
You could go cheaper and get a 3 star rating'd drive for $85 [2].
To fill your chassis with the Seagate: 1x$1499 plus 8x$119 = $2451
To fill your chassis with the Toshiba: 1x$1499 plus 8x$85 = $2179
It's not really marketing junk -- different drive firmware does make a difference in NAS and RAID applications. I'd probably be looking only at 4TB Ultrastars to fill the ARC-8050, or SSDs. I might go with something lower end for an 1813+ since you're probably not buying a gig-e connected NAS for performance.
(it depends, though -- if you're doing just huge volumes of audio, you probably only care about reliability and sustained performance, and not much performance at that; and even flac doesn't use much disk space. it's video or other info which requires high-speed direct-attach drives in 20TB chunks.)
Funny everyone assumes that "Pros" dont care about money. I just see this as 1500 bucks i dont have to spend when getting a workstation from another vendor.
1500 you wouldnt have to pay if the Mac Pro had some form of support for internal drives. Its 1500 you have to spend because Apple sacrificed expandability for design, size and light weight in a workstation computer.. It really only makes any sense if you need to lug the thing around alot (in which case i would think a top of the line macbook pro would be the better choice), or you just dont care about the money.
This is true. I wonder what the profit margin is on the new Mac Pro vs the old? Was there a $2999 version of the old? If there was, I wonder if they're basically pocketing the difference in cost, because they've conditioned us to spend $2999 on them. (I'm assuming the new Mac Pro is cheaper to produce than the old, but I could be wrong.)
