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

[stoprunner]

I'm running cubase 2.2 in a powerbook G4 1g with 1g of ram and a lacie d2 external drive thru a m-audio 410 and I have tried different places for my project files, in and out the Pb, 800 or 400, but I've come to the conclusion that cubase is a hungry beast and needs a bigger machine to run properly, just 3 plugs at a time and the project becomes slow and cliks, I must say that the vsts I used are heavy (Kontact,Arturia's moog, etc) so, for my experience, it is just cubase that needs big cpu power to run smoothly, I've put on hold the upgrade to version 3 for now because of it.