I hear ya Shane – I love the Caldigit HD One I’ve got in my own suite but I’m out working in producers’ suites more often than not and more often than not, it’s on fairly paired down systems.
Good call on using 422 for 5D footage – it’s really been on the advice of colourists that I’ve been going to HQ…
As for drive space, you’re totally right – space is cheaper than cheap these days, but as an editor I find I get stuck with recommending a good archiving strategy as pretty much everything is file-based for me these days.
Cloning hard drives is the lowest-cost option but not fail safe – but really, HDD backing up the source footage and printing masters to tape still seems to be the most realistic option until LTO gets cheaper or flash drives get bigger, no?