external drive

[hadje]

hi,
i have purchased a firewire drive for my laptop (p4 2.4,512 RAM, XP). i want to use it for audio, but i have no idea what i am doing!
i have yet to install my new software (Fruity Loops, Cakewalk). do i somehow have to "choose" the drive when i open up fruity loops, or do i actually install fruity loops on the drive itself? as you can see i am not clear on where software resides and how to make sure that i am using my external drive rather than the slow internal laptop drive. all i have done so far is to plug the new drive in and run the drivers for it off of the enclosed cd.
if i am being unclear i apologize for my ignorance...

peace
christopher

 

[TexRoadkill]

Usually you use the external drive just for recording and playing back the audio files. You would probably want to run the actual programs off of your internal drive and set the save file directory in Cakewalk to the external drive.

Harddrive speed shouldn't affect how a program runs but it will have a big effect on the number of tracks you can stream at once. If you can save that bandwidth only for streaming audio then the better off you will be.