External USB2 hard drive - fast enough?

[Razor1548]

Hello people,

I am using a laptop with one internal hard drive, and from reading in various places online it seems clear that I need a dedicated hard drive for audio.

To save the difficulty of fitting an internal drive (which may not even be possible, though I am guessing the floppy drive could be removed to make space), I am planning on using an external USB drive.

Is this likely to be fast enough? The laptop is a fairly recent model with Athlon 2500 processor and 512Megs of ram so I believe the single hard drive is my number one performance ‘bottle neck’ at the moment.

Any advice is much appreciated.

Thanks,

Mark

 

[Ed Dixon]

How many tracks are you tring to record with the laptop? What audio interface will you be using with the laptop?

Ed

 

[Razor1548]

How many tracks are you tring to record with the laptop? What audio interface will you be using with the laptop?

Ed

Tascam 224 (using N-Track and Reason 2.0 more often than not).

I rarely record more than 4 tracks at the moment. That probably won't increase beyond 6.

Cheers

 

[lpdeluxe]

I use USB 2.0 hard drives for backup & archiving & from time to time I find that I need to run a session from the external drive instead of the internal one. I have never had problems with it. I am running XP w a MB w builtin USB 2.0 ports but I had substantially the same experience with Win98SE and a PCI USB port.