All On External Drive? Options

[eyemgh]

Can I isolate all of my recording software and projects on an external firewire hard drive? Would there be any performance advantages? Disadvantages? Thanks!

M

[lepetitmartien]

Which model of computer are you the happy user?

In a general manner, you can move the audio file in a FW drive. Now, an internal SATA or IDE drive would be better, as one sound engineer here did some teste and found theere a tiny differences other files recorded on a SCSI/IDE/SATA drive and the same over FW. But this is a very professional issue important for high end needs. For the common guys, it's ok, and a lot of pro are happy using FW, especially when recording with a laptop.

Now, for your software, it's different, your apps should be in the apps folder of your user account. and some may have troubles (may is important) if installed elsewhere. If you need to move your apps around, have a system install handy on a FW drive with your apps on, and move the drive around and boot from it. The real issue i'd see would be the swap file on the FW drive, but telling the system to move it's swap file elsewhere is a matter of one restart.

In short:
- your audio YES
- your samples YES
- Your apps, only with a system on the drive and booting from it.