Firewire 800 Options

[bonzulu]

Hi, I'm running Cubase SX3 on a G4 Powerbook. The VST plugins are in the powerbook and the project folders (songs) are on a Maxtor external hard drive with FireWire 400. Every is fine till the project grows and starts to stutter or worse. I'm habituating holding the fx plugins to a minimum and the other standard CPU economizing procedures.
My question is twofold: 1- Does it make more sense to move the active projects into the powerbook for a session and only use the external HD for storage? and 2- Would a firewire 800 disk make a significant difference in stutter free/smooth data transfer? If yes to the second question, is it also sensible to store the larger VST libraries on a firewire 800 disk? The question boils down to- my understanding is that an internal (ATA?) drive is faster than and external disk (correct?) and if so,does firewire 800 significantly close the gap? Thank you in advance for any help in this regard, Bonzulu

[lepetitmartien]

Right now I'm still with FW800/400/USB2 and FW400/USB2 enclosure with regular IDE drives in (Maxtor and IBM respectively).

FW800 is supposed to deliver about 70 MB/s, note that right now (got to make the test again, I did only 27-28 MB on FW800 on my G5, but it seems G5 FW800 is buggy (in a slow way) i'll update on this once I've come across some evidence or better results.

i've still to come across FW/SATA enclosure but it should be just fine I don't know the theoretical data rates of SATA though (anyone?). Right now, IDE drives in FW400 or 800 are fast enough for a very comfortable number of tracks,

FW to SCSI adapters are made for special use (connecting peculiar peripherals like scanners for example) they are SCSI 1-2 device usually (as far as I know) so they are certainly not made for heavy data rate, forget them.

Very fast RPM drives are made but we are talking upon drives with very high rate demands (think video, motion picture soundtrack recording...) as soon as you enter the domain of FAST drive solution, there's plenty of possibilities beforehand like RAID 0, 10 (0 + 1) SCSI solution (RAID also), fiber channel, NAT etc. For common use in Audio, some RAID in IDE or SATA is more than enough, and expensive enough too we're talking of dozens and dozens of stereo tracks at the same time without glitch.