You really DO want to record to a separate hard drive(and NOT a partition of the system drive). Something to consider; do you REALLY need to record at 96K? Tons of studios are working at 44.1 and/or 48K. Consider the end market. No point in super-high rez if your final product is going to be a down-loadable MP3
. In any case, recording to the system drive, while it does work to a degree, its a guarantee of poor performance, so why hamstring yourself right out of the gate. Having a compatible computer is step #1, Next step is to perform ALL the required system tweaks. Step 3 is to use a configuration that is recommended and supported. Besides, just buy a firewire drive with dual FW400 ports and daisy-chain the interface after the drive. Or, if your laptop has a card slot, look for an eSATA card and use an eSATA hard drive for best performance. USB 2 drives are only supported under Windows 7(eSATA is good regardless). Remember, whatever drive you get, make it 7200 rpm, large cache(32MB is good), and no "green" drives allowed.