Dedicated hard drive - external or internal?

[javashred]

I have heard many theories on this. Seems to be most people agree for recording, external hard drives are just to slow. For recording to a dedicated drive I think I am going to go with an internal drive. I have also heard that you really shouldn't go over 80GB because it will be to slow - true or false? Now the G5 comes with a 160GB drive. Could I just partition that drive and be done?



Would an external drive be good for backup?



I am getting ready to order my G5 and am trying to figure out if I should have a 2nd dedicated internal drive or just partition the one.



Thanks!

Chris

[Garrett]

The singer of my band used an external 100GB firewire drive for our CD and it seemed to do okay. I think the only issues we had were with the laptop he was using. He also used this drive for dj'ing.

He just purchased a 250GB firewire drive to replace it. I would think firewire is fast enough to not have any access issues.

The nice thing about the external drive is it allows taking the files anywhere. For example, the CD was recorded on a Windows PC, but our friend mixed it on his Mac. All they had to do was plug in the firewire and bingo!

[redmax61]

An external drive would be OK for backup, but not in terms of using it as a data drive for recording purposes. You will want to use an internal drive, but it has to be separate from your program drive. In case your computer needs to access the program drive during the recording or playback process, it would mean less of a chance of a dropout if the data is coming from a different drive.

[FrankiePRS]

Allow me to abandon the theoretical and tell you what I've experienced. IMHO, Robin is absolutely correct.

I have an 80g fire-wire external drive. I tried using it as a data drive for recording. It worked to a point, but occasionally, it would bog down... always at a critical point (which is pretty much always in recording LOL).

I installed a 7200rpm 120g hard drive, and partitioned it at 40 and 80. No problems. Ever. No lag, no stutter, no bog. It's a night-and-day difference. The fire-wire is great for backing up data, but that's it.

Hope that helps.

[codeorama]

I have an iomega usb 2.0 (which is faster than firewire) 250 gig external drive.
I use it primarily as a back up drive, but I have recorded directly to it and I had no problems. It's 7000+ rpms as well.