James Hall wrote: ↑Thu Feb 22, 2018 2:44 pm
There is some risk management in all things. An interruption to a USB drive is a little more likely. USB cables can be accidentally unplugged. The power to the external drive can be accidentally turned off. The benefits out way the cost. If you setup automatic backups to your server and have your equipment plugged into an uninterruptible power supply then the chances of data loss is minimal. Walking 6 TB of data across an office and copying it to a local drive is a lot faster than Gigabit Ethernet.
Another option on the Risk / Price / Performance is maxing out the RAM on your motherboard, e.g. 256GB and setting up 2x64GB RAM drives for working project and temporary files. Couple this with a background shadow copy to cheaper slower storage for your project data and you have disks a few times faster than fast SSD though similarly more expensive. Depends on your bus and DDR speeds, but
speeds of 4-6 GB/s are reported here. Power outage is likely to lead to lost work, so you might want to consider a UPS in this scenario.
I helped a client spec up a mid range PC for point cloud and photogrammetry work a few weeks back and we went for an Alienware box with 2x1GB SSD, 2x8TB HDD, 64GB RAM, Threadripper 2950x and 2x1080ti GPUs. The thinking is that newer releases of all the software will become more heavily multi-threaded and start leveraging the GPU more, so while 1x108ti and a i7 or i9 would have been faster at a similar price for processes today, the twin GPU high core thread ripper will improve with new releases of software. Also worth looking very carefully at the security setup, as I'm starting to see a number of AV products hogging CPU and disk for no added benefit.