External Harddrive for Laptop advice needed

[dvcox]

I use an IBM thinkpad T40 (xp pro, 1500MHz, 1.5 GHz, with 512 MB of RAM) to do harddisk recording. I use an m-audio transit 24 bit external soundcard. I record using Vegas 6/Acid, CoolEdit2Pro, Fruityloops (and others) and have been very pleased with the quality. I've outgrown my harddrive and I'm thinking of getting an External Harddrive and have a couple of questions.

I've heard Firewire is preferable to USB2 and both Firewire PCMCIA adapters and External Harddrive come in two flavors: 480Mbps and c. 800Mbps. I think only the 480Mbps is within my budget for both adapter and ext. harddrive.

Does anyone out have experience with a similar setup? Do you think I could work in a multitrack situation with the files on the external harddrive? I want to avoid having the files hiccup when playing back or laying down a new track to old.

I usually can work with 6 tracks of stereo wavs before it starts to stutter and I need to mix down to a reference track. I don't want to lose any system performance.

Do you think there is any performance improvement of using Firewire over USB2?

Thanks in advance for advice.

[Clit Torres]

Originally Posted by dvcox

I use an IBM thinkpad T40 (xp pro, 1500MHz, 1.5 GHz, with 512 MB of RAM) to do harddisk recording. I use an m-audio transit 24 bit external soundcard. I record using Vegas 6/Acid, CoolEdit2Pro, Fruityloops (and others) and have been very pleased with the quality. I've outgrown my harddrive and I'm thinking of getting an External Harddrive and have a couple of questions.

I've heard Firewire is preferable to USB2 and both Firewire PCMCIA adapters and External Harddrive come in two flavors: 480Mbps and c. 800Mbps. I think only the 480Mbps is within my budget for both adapter and ext. harddrive.

Does anyone out have experience with a similar setup? Do you think I could work in a multitrack situation with the files on the external harddrive? I want to avoid having the files hiccup when playing back or laying down a new track to old.

I usually can work with 6 tracks of stereo wavs before it starts to stutter and I need to mix down to a reference track. I don't want to lose any system performance.

Do you think there is any performance improvement of using Firewire over USB2?

Thanks in advance for advice.

Wow, that's a low track count, even for your humble setup. Either your running a shitload of plugs, or your hardrive needs a good defrag.

If you're on a tighter budget, don't rule out the option of using an external enclosure. BTW, there really is no noticable difference in transfer speed between using USB2 or Firewire.

These Bytecc smartdrives are what I use.

http://www.coolerexpress.com/cooler-...l3hadrexe.html

[dvcox]

CT,

Thanks for the info. With luck when I redistribute some of the junk on my computer to an external drive I'll probably get improved performance (and more tracks!). Someone on the Computer Music forum suggested that I continue recording using the main computer and store on the external. That would probably work better for me. I'll check out the Bytecc's.

Thanks, Vance