External Hard drive - slower than internal?

[Moxon]

So until now, i have been recording all audio to my internal boot drive. But after a series of problems, i have decided to shy away from any risky procedure. I know that DIGI does not recommend recording to your boot drive, so I have decided to get an external drive to record to.

The only thing is, people have indicated that your internal drive is much faster than the external drive. If so, by how much? And what capabilities exactly would i be limiting by recording to an external drive? # of plugins? Track count?

Any input would be appreciated.

[orage]

What they mean about the internal drive being faster only applies when you've added a second drive to your desktop machine (ala SATA) and are recording to that. The bus speed to these drives is generally faster than that to external drives, so that's where the comparison is being made.

Now, it is very easy these days to get an external FW drive that is faster than your boot drive. What you're looking for here is RPM speed. Most laptops don't ship with anything faster than a 5400 RPM drive. It's easy and affordable to get an external FW drive that clocks in at 7200 RPM. In this case, you're killing two birds with one stone: you're not only using a faster drive, you're recording to a drive other than your boot drive which is going to allow a larger amount of data to move before the system bogs down.

Basically, an external FW drive is going to work well on either a laptop or desktop setup...but if you have a desktop and are really serious about performance, look into getting a second internal drive that's dedicated solely to audio.

Hope this helps!