Hard Drive. Help Requested, Newbie enquiry Options

[Foxyphil]

I have an emac G4,1 Ghz, running osX 10.39. Also recently purchased Focusrite Saffire, bundled with cubase le. Its clear to me that my mac just doesnt "do" 192hz, but I want to try to record files at 96hz. Doing this currently uses up a huge ammount of cpu.

I plan therefore to get an external drive, and will prob go the firewire route, maybe with USB2 compatibility. My question to experienced users is this. Is there any possible DISadvantages at getting a 300 or 400gb drive? Is it possible that an emac couldnt "hack" that ammount? The prices dont seem that much more expensive (I was thinking either Seagate or Carrilion) than for 100 gb. To be honest< id rather not have to upgrade any more hardware for at least a year or two - hopefully longer. I would actually like to try making a few tracks now.

Any input would be great.

Thanks in advance and thanks for great site too.

Phil

[lepetitmartien]

USB2 is faster on paper, but is a mess like other flavours of USB at real time uses.

USB2 does better than USB1 and USB1.1, but firewire is more the reference. Also, a hard drive in firewire can boot your computer if need be, not a USB drive.

Some side remarks on "my" defrag method:
- it is NOT suitable for system partitions, you have to clone the system, not copy it. But for a partitons with only files like audio etc, it's ok.
- files under 20 MB are optimized by OS X on its own (among the thing it does when it can run the BSD scripts at night, it can defragment small files…

I'd be very cautious upon defragmentation/optimization using software on a system drive, there's been horror stories especially among Logic users… Though Drive10 has some good reputation. But we have not enough feedback to be sure for all uses.