Thanks for the explanation. I am going to try firewire 800 for sure. I am not sure i understand your point 4. the max speed is 800 mbps whether there is one hard drive or two. if there was only one hard drive it has 800 mbps all for itself. If there are two then both together have to share the 800 mbps speed. Hence my point of using one 800 mbps for one hard drive and another 480 (USB) for the second. Also lets say i have two hard drives now. Is it still better to use them separately or will a RAID 0 arrangement be a better choice

@rainguitar Thanks man. will try this out

Indeed, the max speed for a FW800 drive is around 800mbps (I'm not sure if that's bits or bytes, but that aside...) when it comes to FW, it doesn't work quite the same way as you might expect when multiple devices are connected. I could try and explain it, but you'd be better off doing a search online for FW800 protocol, or, "how does FW800 work" to learn more. That said, and taking your premise into account, here's my analogy for how FW800 [i]doesn't[/i] work: Let's say you had a flashlight powered by one battery. The bulb glows with a certain amount of brightness. Now you connect another lightbulb to that circuit (in series, e.g., a daisy-chain). Not only would the original bulb glow more dimly (say, half as bright as before) but the second bulb would glow with the same dim light. That's [i]NOT[/i] how FireWire works. :) And finally, RAID 0 is not needed. If anything, per the advice I've gotten from friends even more familiar with this stuff than myself, it will only slow down an audio system's performance. Just one final word... I have a system where I've got 9 hard drives. Many of them are daisy-chained. No performance problems, and I use a LOT of sample-based libraries.

As i have only one firewire port on my mbp, would it be ok to run samples from the internal drive and projects from an external fw800 drive? Or could you possibly recommend a decent firewire bus/hub, i also have a firewire 400 interface so running the interface plus external drives is not possible at the moment. One more question, when using a firewire hub would both devices run at their optimum speed or the slower speed (400), if slower, is there fix/workaround to get the best speed. cheers

It's never a good idea to use your system drive for anything other than... your system! Now, that's not to say that what you asked about (sample libraries running off your system drive) can't be done. In fact, it's done all the time, but not always with a very high degree of success. To configure a system that has the least possibility of getting bogged down by a lot of creativity-killing "disk too slow" or "audio could not be processed in time" error messages you really should have one hard drive per task, as I described above. In terms of connecting firewire devices of mixed speeds, I'll reply in a separate post in a separate post or thread.

Great thanks for the reply, i don't do any recording with my macbook but i do use a lot of audio and software instruments so i get the occasional overload. So on that note i will make a new thread for my other question, cheers!