I have a reason a tower is a good thing….I have six of them in a rack. Everything is inside. I don’t have room for a pile of tethered devices strewn about the server room. I don’t want the Mac in the edit bay….we have quite and comfortable edit rooms because the tower is in the server room. We tether SATA JBOD boxes to the SATA cards in the MacPros. We can share drives that way. We have a solid Gigabit Ethernet network that serves our needs to edit projects over the network from machine to machine. Media is on different systems and we can share the media across the network. CCOR in one room, edit in another, sound in another all using the footage on one of the computers.
Think compatibility. I love Sonnett, but along the way some devices become obsolete with an OS upgrade. So the card inside the Sonnett box might be compatible, but the Sonnett box isn’t so I have a big problem. Not picking on Sonnett….I like their stuff.
But Thunderbolt is new enough to the Mac community and these new devices are, well, new enough that building a six suite facility around them is quite risky and expensive.
I see the progression away from a Tower ending up with a pile of tethered devices that need to be near the Mac with compatibility issues and no one using the same hardware. Very hard to troubleshoot some of these things once the number of connections and devices goes up.
Yikes. Get me my MacPro!
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com