A few things on the topic of internal SSD drives @shinbeth .
The problem with your line of logic is you assume people work like you do. We don't.
Some people record lots of live musicians playing together. Some people record one track at a time. Some build beats and rap on top of them. Some use a ton of bandwidth-hogging string libraries, while scoring to video. Of course, for the latter purpose, you are right that large internal drives are ideal for that audio playback. BUT your one size fits all perspective is not a real world thing. An internal 8tb drive is completely foolish for most of the rest of us people. For the film scorer, well, there's your use case. But the rest of the 99% of us? Hell no, my friend.
In an article from 2009, the internal hard drive of Macs were able to easily play back 255 tracks at 24/96k (the most tracks Logic supported at a time). Those were SSD SATA3 drives. Those are indeed faster than a thunderbolt 4 drive, which does top out at 2mbps. I suck at math but you can figure out how many tracks the 2mbps SSD could record and play back. But let me say for all but a few of us, that is PLENTY. So the mythical 8tb internal drive is complete overkill.
Also, I have never once in my professional life experienced a single recording studio where they recorded audio from a band (multitrack) to the system volume. That's not for performance anymore but it is for redundancy reasons. If that single source of failure goes down the entire studio goes down. That is a non-starter.
In the video world, if you are working on short form content, by yourself, one project at a time, then maybe that 8tb internal drive will do you. In the corporate world where I work, we work on 100TB RAIDs. We work on multiple projects at a time, we pass them among roles (rough, color correction, sweetening, etc). We DON'T hand the machine off to each person. They instead access the SAN over fiber or 10gbe. 8TB is NOT enough for serious work on longer form video with multiple streams of 8k video. In this case your internal 8TB drive is woefully inadequate.
Also for many of us the idea of putting all our media on our boot drives is a TERRIBLE idea if there is a drive failure. In your world, you would absolutely have MULTIPLE machines with 8tb internal drives with the same drive image AND back them up together daily in case of a failure. With the above mentioned RAID systems, they are designed so multiple drives can fail and you don't lose data. Your mythical 8tb system is a very bad idea in that world.
Certainly my friend if you edit for YouTube and you do fewer projects at a time, you have great media management and you work by yourself, your internal drive option seems like a terrific solution! But unless you have a backup system you can immediately switch to in case of a failure or OS problem, you are walking on thin ice if you are a pro working on a deadline. The important thing is to NEVER think one size fits all.. somehow you are the expert and know everyone else's use cases and workflows? No offense, but it's clear you do not.
At any rate.. it's clear from this thread that there are a great many of us who disagree with you. Respectfully, it seems very foolish for you to come into this thread and tell us what we SHOULD be doing, even if in many cases we are professionals who have been doing this kind of work for over a decade.
