It is unlikely I would need more memory than 64GB and the 1TB SSD is more than necessary to run the operating system with lots of room to spare. With four TB ports expansion should be easy and very fast. . . . Any thoughts from those knowledgeable?
"All generalizations are false, including this one."Having said that, UNIX systems typically exploit all their available main memory—"RAM"—quite efficiently, and the more you have, the better. (MacOS is a variant of UNIX.) Especially on a highly-parallelized machine with many cores, the amount of hardware memory that is available will influence how rapidly simultaneously coactive processes will complete. So, as a general rule (but see above), I am inclined to max out the RAM on any new UNIX machine I purchase.
Not only that, but the new Apple hardware architecture shares main memory among three subsystems: the primary computing cores, the graphics accelerator cores, and something Apple calls the "neural engine." Apple doesn't precisely explain that third compute subsystem as far as I have been able to determine, but it seems to be some sort of specialized processor for matrix operations. However the fact that the primary memory is shared among the three functions would reinforce my view that it is worth paying for as much as the particular platform will support, especially because field upgrades reportedly are not feasible on the new Mac Studio products.
Secondary storage, such as solid-state drives, rarely are as performance-sensitive. As long as you have enough primary storage to cache the files that are constantly in use, everything else—for example, raw captures from still or video cameras—probably can comfortably be consigned to an external storage medium without any significant performance degradation. A channel-attached drive or network-attached server should work well—at least, as long as the latter is available through a 100 megabit or faster network connection.
