Media Drive for new MacPro

We're budgeted to replace my circa mid 2010 5,1 with a new MacPro in Q2 of 2020.

In regards to media storage, I see three viable paths, external enclosure RAID 5 24TB via Thunderbolt, internal MXP Promise Pegasus R4i Raid 5 24TB, or OWC Accelsior 4M2 8TB via PCIe.

The Pegasus and external should deliver somewhere in the ballpark of 700MB/s +/- transfer speeds yes? While the Accelsior should deliver up to 6000 MB/s transfer speeds - or so it's claimed.

I have a 1TB Acceslior PICe card in my current MacPro as my boot drive and it's been rock solid for over seven years now.

The Acceselsior 4M2 is not RAID but I would do a daily back up of all media to a spinning disk drive using the Pegasus J2 8TB MXP. I also do a daily back up up my A RAID 0 to my B RAID 0 so that's a workflow that I'm happy with. I would also use the other slot in the Pegasus J2 for a drive that backs up my main OS drive every day - or for my Time Machine drive. Yeah, I'm kind of paranoid on the backup front...

My work is a mix of HD and 4K and I often have multiple streams playing at once with various plug-ins, color correction, graphics, multi-cams and what not all layered together - it's a lot of commercial spot work.

The blazing speed of the Acceslesior 4M2 seems like the most robust, future proof path. The 8TB size is sufficient for my work as I regularly archive libraries off to keep a tidy house. Am I missing anything thinking that the Accelsior 4M2 is the best path for active media storage?

This would all be on a 3.3GHz 12-core with 96GB of RAM.

Thanks for taking a look at this and any input is appreciated.

A lot of people buy PC towers because they allow you to stripe 6-8 hard drives together. The Promise Pegasus MPX module for the Mac Pro is expensive and only allows for 4 hard drives to be used. It suck to have a huge tower like the 2019 Mac Pro and then have to buy and external RAID system but it will probably be the best option.

arc wrote: A lot of people buy PC towers because they allow you to stripe 6-8 hard drives together. The Promise Pegasus MPX module for the Mac Pro is expensive and only allows for 4 hard drives to be used. It suck to have a huge tower like the 2019 Mac Pro and then have to buy and external RAID system but it will probably be the best option.

I think the new Mac Pro are not aimed to host massive internal HD storage. Professional postproduction environment workflow is moving toward internal networks (ie. 10GB ethernet) and external networks (iFrame like) where data files can easily be to-from shared in your workstation on very fast storage subsystem. Perhaps the classical PC tower maxed with HD's, PCIe audio, PCIe video, GPU's, etc will be a thing of past

I know many post production houses use network storage. I have edit off network storage but I don't think cog2803 said anything about network storage. If cog2803 were using network storage he probably would not have asked about other hard drive solutions would he?