Thanks Derek. Earlier today, my friend answered the same question via emai. He does technical stage production in Hollywood and Las Vegas and once worked for Apple and Adobe. I looked up the specs just now for LaCie TB drives. Very impressive, and prices have come down significantly since 2012.
But a clear-eyed look at my real needs, not just desires, dictates that I'll pass on SD for awhile. I have 2TB USB 3 ext drive for backups. BU only takes me 2:45 minutes done incrementally with SuperDuper.
Here is what my friend wrote:
You asked me about an SSD for your configuration before. I said that I didn't see the dollar to value ratio for you then. I still don't.
I have an internal 256 SSD. Yes, it's fast. But I have to store most of my data on an externals, because 256GB is just not big enough by a long shot. Therefore, other than boot times and proc speed, my data handling is limited by I/O which is a 1TB FW800 right now. I have 3 drives on that chain, for a total of about 4TB of storage, transferring at about 800MB a second on a good day. That's less than one-quarter of what a Thunderbolt drive can do.
So my SSD gets me 6 second boot times, and that's about it. Proc speed is more related to cache size for photos and video manipulation. Music doesn't care. So, big whoop. I can boot up in six ****ing seconds, but I hardly ever re-boot. These SSDs would have been a real blessing back when crashes had us rebooting 10 times a day. Now I do it once a week to clear system memory for security, and even then I sometimes forget. These machines are so stable now.
I think if you are happy with your rig, and have 8 gigs of RAM, your money is better spent on fast mass storage--a 1 or 2TB Thunderbolt drive for instance--and backup storage. If you are not backed up, you can loose everything in a millisecond. (backblaze.com is an excellent Mac only online backup service, BTW. They are secure, and FAST. Beats the socks off of Carbonite)
But hey, clearly you want an SSD. So get one.