Apple Now Offering $2,600 8TB SSD Upgrade Option for Mac Pro

I'm sure they'll sell like hotcakes now...

Seriously, though - get the 1TB model and add NVMe SSD storage capacity via PCIe.

$2600 is actually reasonable.

I'm sure they'll sell like hotcakes now...

Seriously, though - get the 1TB model and add NVMe SSD storage capacity via PCIe.

Yeah, I’m not getting exactly why you would even want your boot drive to be 8TB (and locked down because of the t2 and all)

That’s more than my first Mac Pro cost.

Apple 2TB SSD. Read/Write speed 2800/2500 MB/s. $800 upgrade on top of the 256GB SSD they will not subtract the value of when it is replaced. So about $900 for 2TB.

WD SN750 2TB SSD. Read/Write speeds 3500/2900 MB/s. Bought one for $270 new.

Not even going to mention those cRaZy PCIE 4.0 drives.

8K video cameras are more common now and the bit rates are insane. For most editing tasks you’ll be throttled by how quickly you can access the disk instead of processing performance.

That YouTube review with 16 4K videos merged into a single video and played in real time? You’re not going to pull that off with a $500 SSD.

These drives are 3x faster than 10GbE so network storage can’t compete. Other internal drives with similar speeds might actually be more expensive - though it’s hard to tell because everyone advertises their write cache buffer speed instead of their sustained write speed - the buffer typically typically fills up in a couple seconds of sustained write activity.

Regardless of price, if you need 8TB you are much better off not configuring your boot drive that large. Keep your data drive separate from your boot drive.

Next Level: 16TB RAM, 1PB SSD

That was so quick it almost feels like they should have allowed people to order with 8TB and just have their delivery dates delayed by a week or so.

Thats not bad at all, that’s considerably less than what Dell charges for enterprise SSDs.

A couple things I want to know.

We know from teardowns that there are 2 NVMe slots and it uses the same bespoke modules as the iMac Pro.

1) Is the 8TB option a pair of 4TB NVMe drives (as opposed to 1 8TB module)? and if so, is it running in RAID 0? If so, then I can see having 8TB of SSD running at near PCIe 4.0 speeds (~5GB/sec) for a main work partition as desirable for heaving duty processing.

2) Are these NVMe SSD drives using MLC or TLC NAND cahips? Right now, only Samsung's 9x0 Pro drives are left using MLC NAND chips, which have more durability and are correspondingly more expensive. Given the "PRO" focus, I would hope so.

Right now, the only 4TB M.2 NVMe drive I can find retails around $700. If Samsung made an 970 Evo 4TB version, it would retail around $1000.

That makes the "Apple Tax" not too bad IMHO. Using MLC NAND is more expensive (because it needs more NAND chips), so if is this a "PRO" drive and uses MLC, the cost of 8TB becomes downright reasonable.