Laptop and external hard drive

[pennylink]

Can anyone help me figure out the best way to utilize the external hard drive with my new laptop...

Dell Inspiron 9300
Pentium M 750 Processor (Centrino) 1.86GHz/533MHz FSB
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
60GB internal hard drive at 7,200rpm with 8MB cache
160GB external firewire 800 hard drive at 7,200rpm, connected via LaCie 800 PCMCIA card
Presonus Firebox soundcard connected via the laptop's firewire 400 port
Cubase is my sequencer, but I may be switching to Sonar 4.

How should I use each hard drive so I get the best mileage in terms of efficiency, speed and track count? Bearing in mind the size of today's sample libraries and that the internal drive is the smaller of the two, I was thinking:

- Internal drive: Windows XP and all programs
- External drive: audio data and sample libraries/Acid loops

Any better suggestions? Should the external drive be partioned if I'm going to use it to store both sample libraries, Acid loops AND audio data?

Thank you

 

[bennychico11]

- Internal drive: Windows XP and all programs
- External drive: audio data and sample libraries/Acid loops

that's the best way you can do it. partition it if you want to, but you don't have to....it won't increase any throughput or anything. and make sure that the internal drives has the audio software you're using installed on it.