External Vs Internal Hard Drives, which is better? Options

[bluetone78]

Is there a difference, performance-wise, between your standard internal serial ATA drive and your standard external Firewire drive? I'm assuming similar hard drive specs - I'm more concerned with how the bus effects performance. For example how well would a firewire drive handle a large sample library (5+ GB, at once), reading direct from disk, where it would have to seek out large amounts of info at once?

[Lotus17]

I don't really know how much of a performance issue there is. I know that Trent Reznor of NIN has been using a lot of Lacie Big Disk Extremes for his recent projects, see picture:
http://www.nin.com/current/photos/3_13_06.jpg

I know that Reznor has been known to use a lot of layering in his works, up to 70+ tracks on his cd 'The FRAGILE." I don't know if he had certain setups that allowed that many tracks with little problems, so I am unsure.

If I am correct though, SATA speeds are much faster than USB2.0, FW400, and FW800. So performace wise, SATA is better. But I am unsure if there is really a noticeable difference. I have a friend using a Seagate External Hard Drive on a Laptop via USB2.0 with Pro Tools LE and he has had good results. I have seen probably 15-25 audio tracks on a song and I think his limitation is the computer itself rather than the drives.

I however am going to buy another internal hard drive for my G5 even though I own an External Hard Drive. I like to use my external drive to be able to make things portable and for back up. But I will probably buy a 250GB Seagate NL35 SATA. They just came out recently. They are higher quality than consumer level products and also are quieter. Here's a noise level comparison chart, as well as other spec comparisons:
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/2005...400832NS_6.html

Hope that helps you make a better judgement.