> Then every VFX studio I've worked at, between 4 and 400 employees, is doing it wrong apparently.

 

Yeah, small shop IT is almost always done wrong (I quit film school in 1991, worked as a small biz IT wonk until 96, then big company IT as infrastructure guy full-time 96-2000 and part-time until 2005 as I got back into filmmaking). But worked on and/or designed hundreds of small shop setups and half a dozen big shop (200+) networks.

Again, this is why phones will soon have 1TB+ of local storage despite 5G’s arrival – it’s physic and economics. But most small shops don’t have the expertise, resources or time to get it right, so it’s the expedient.

 

The work directly off server model was designed when you had desktops often saving word processing and spreadsheet files directly on floppy drives, so moving to shared storage was about the same speed, sometimes faster. But the GUI world, images and now video has pushed the physics of it all to the forefront.