What type of work do you do? If you are king video editing having the media on the same drive as the application slows things down. It sounds like speed is an issue for you. What I have been recommending to people is Promise Technologies Pegasus2 Raid array. There is a diskless model you can get, but the 8TB 4 disk version goes for $1430. I'm getting the 12TB 6 disk version myself.
Lots of Windows programming using vmware fusion. The machines inside run oracle, sql, sap, etc with very large databases and I build different applications around those environments and eventually just send back the vm image(s) to companies so they do not ever need to install/set anything up. The performance part of it is needed because when running huge queries/analyzation/mining even having an extra 100/mbs will make a 4 hour analysis run in 2.
Seems weird that I use Mac, but for whatever reason, benchmarks show virtualization works much better on mac & linux as opposed to windows (even if you benchmark headless hyperv). Also, I love Mac and having just one machine to close the ecosystem is great. Not to mention I do iPhone/Ipad development for fun.
So...
I ordered the 8-core 32gb (thinking I might upgrade to 64, still haven't decided), so neither memory or cores is a problem. But having 2-3 of these running at the same time, they become very IO chatting. So it's not constant read/write since fusion queues those in memory and then dumps the data in blocks, but within an hour you will have 10-20 gigs written to/read from. Then you get into snapshots which I use often so test and then rollback changes, on average these are about 16gb written & read. Otherwise everything sits mostly ideal if I'm working on smaller stuff.
Separate drive makes more sense, but at the same time I like the idea of just having a mac with nothing connected to it (other than monitors). Also, my VM's come and go, and needed drive space goes from 400 to 800 and sometimes I have to use an external if some company has a huge 800gb image (extremely rare).
That and the price difference will be big and unnecessary. Even if say the Lacie is $1000 (I think it will be more because of pcie drives) and I buy a Mac Pro 256gb, it's more expensive then just getting the Mac Pro with 1TB
But sounds like you have experience, is it worth having a separate drive? Does it help with performance, etc? I know you don't work directly with large VM's but I can imagine it would be very similar to video editing/streaming or maybe a scratch drive.