I could see buying a Mac Pro for video production or scientific/engineering simulations and data analysis where top performance and ability to run long (hours or days) number crunching applications were important. And for that RAID 1 or 5 and ECC memory would improve reliability to reduce the likelihood of crashing and losing possibly days of work. And for this a top of the line Mac Pro makes sense as well.
That said, I can't see paying what would end up being thousands extra for photo processing, some home videos, and "goofing off". Hey, a Mac Mini was being used. Ignore the prestige/braggingrights factor and think of the camera gear that could be bought for the difference that might actually increase one's income!
As far as I'm concerned, the iMac is a "pro" system. It's every bit as good as the business Dell computers I had bought before switching to a Mac.
The 27" i7 iMac will give far more performance than is needed. I've got one and Photoshop flies. In fact everything flies. The high resolution display is fantastic. You can keep the 24" monitor as a second monitor (I've got an old but quality 20" to the side). I've got 8GB of RAM but haven't gone over 4GB used. For me photography is a serious hobby but the system is used professionally for programming, and electrical engineering course development which includes recording demonstrations of running CPU intensive CAD software in a Windows virtual machine. Multiple cores and high speed are a must for smooth videos.
As was pointed out, RAID is no substitute for backups. You never want a backup scheme where the backup data is stored internal to the computer because power supply problems can wipe out every drive at once. And then there is theft/fire/whatever to consider. I use an external drive for TimeMachine but have a separate server computer (consider it as a NAS for this example) for archival data. I make a separate image backup of the iMac once a week to alternating external drives, and a quarterly entire network backup. Backups are kept offsite. In the event of a harddrive failure I can boot from a backup and be back up in hours (including retrieving the drive, and copying the most recent work from the TimeMachine drive. If the iMac completely fails I've got other Macs I can plug the drives into to access current data.
That said, I can't see paying what would end up being thousands extra for photo processing, some home videos, and "goofing off". Hey, a Mac Mini was being used. Ignore the prestige/braggingrights factor and think of the camera gear that could be bought for the difference that might actually increase one's income!
As far as I'm concerned, the iMac is a "pro" system. It's every bit as good as the business Dell computers I had bought before switching to a Mac.
The 27" i7 iMac will give far more performance than is needed. I've got one and Photoshop flies. In fact everything flies. The high resolution display is fantastic. You can keep the 24" monitor as a second monitor (I've got an old but quality 20" to the side). I've got 8GB of RAM but haven't gone over 4GB used. For me photography is a serious hobby but the system is used professionally for programming, and electrical engineering course development which includes recording demonstrations of running CPU intensive CAD software in a Windows virtual machine. Multiple cores and high speed are a must for smooth videos.
As was pointed out, RAID is no substitute for backups. You never want a backup scheme where the backup data is stored internal to the computer because power supply problems can wipe out every drive at once. And then there is theft/fire/whatever to consider. I use an external drive for TimeMachine but have a separate server computer (consider it as a NAS for this example) for archival data. I make a separate image backup of the iMac once a week to alternating external drives, and a quarterly entire network backup. Backups are kept offsite. In the event of a harddrive failure I can boot from a backup and be back up in hours (including retrieving the drive, and copying the most recent work from the TimeMachine drive. If the iMac completely fails I've got other Macs I can plug the drives into to access current data.