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?

[lepetitmartien]

SATA is faster than IDE/ATA, you can have way much more tracks running from a SATA drive. Period.

In theory, USB 2 is marginaly faster than firewire, but FW is way better at handling files being streamed. I don't say you can't use USB 2, but the same drive in a USB 2 or in a FW 400 enclosure will behave better in FW. FW 800 is twice faster in theory, but in fact, it's slower than the theory, and SATA is faster. In the end, the problem now are drives…

A FW 400 handles already more than 40+ tracks… enough to go…

A few things to consider:

- cache on the drive is no more critical, 8 MB is enough, 16 MB is more important for small files… If you have lots of small snippets…
- The best way to help a drive find things is to partition it, and keep the things which must be found the faster on the first partition. If you have a big sample library, put it eventually with its sisters, on a separate partition. the choice of which samples or audio track will be on the first is a type of main job problem.
- think back up strategy. If you have everything internal, back up external. of have one drive split to back up on it. it helps de-fragment really large files (OS X de-fragment files smaller than 20MB by itself) copy/format/copyback is simple and effective as long as you don't mix up things.
- before buying, check MTBF, Seagate are great overall, but for Maxtor for example not all lines are made equal… (maxline III are better than other lines in Maxtor)