17" Macbookpro Firewire Options

[tig66]

Hi,

I'm thinking of buying a 17" MacbookPro maxed out with 2Gb RAM for use with the new Cubase4 Studio and Kontakt2 sampler + various other VST Instruments.. Spectrasonics, Latigo etc..

I also have an MAudio FW410 interface which I currently use on my G4 Powerbook.. it doesn't give me any problems - as long as I have nothing else connected to either the FW400 or 800 buss.

My question is, are the fw400 and 800 connections on the MacbookPro on seperate busses, or the same?

As I want to go for the faster 100Gb internal drive (7200rpm) I may need to also buy an external 7200rpm FW800 drive to accomodate all my project data.. samples , audio etc.. obviously, if I did this I wouldn't be able to run the MAudio interface reliably if the 800 bus was being shared or 'seen' by the 400 buss..

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated..

Thx

[tig66]

I know this is slightly 'off topic' but still relevant to my original 17" MacbookPro query.

Another alternative could be an eSATA expresscard/34 for use with serial ATA (SAT II) drives which apparently offer speeds nearly 4 times faster than FW800 - eg. this Firmtek card:
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2sm2-e/

I also found this interesting review of the Firmtek SeriTek/2SM2-E card used on a MacbookPro:
http://www.barefeats.com/hard71.html

Obviously, this could end up more costly than the FW800 alternative ie. SAT expresscard/34 card + SAT drivebay enclosure and the removable drives themselves.. but then I would have a fast (and portable) system for handling my samples and audio etc..

Finally, does anyone have any actual experience of using SAT drives compared to FW800 for audio?

Thanks