A simple question:

I've done the good deed and purchased an external firewire drive for my iMac 'studio.' I know I'm supposed to store all audio/song files/projects here rather than my internal drive. My question is, does this "rule" also apply to sample libraries?

For example, I bought a CD that contains 1,000 or so drum loops. I plan on using these both with Reason and directly with Logic. Aside from it being easier to access from a drive rather than a CD, I wanted to copy the files in order to rename them, as they don't currently reflect BPMs. Will storing these on my internal drive cause the same amount of disruption as a song file (i.e. is there any benefit to storing sample libraries on the external drive)?

While I'm at it, should something like an iTunes music folder be taken off the internal drive and ported to the firewire drive as well?

ideally, the firewire drive should give you faster throuput speeds for capturing audio especially multitrack or high res audio such as 24bit and 44.1khz+... since you are using Reason (I think Reason reads samples from RAM and not hard drive) you can store samples on internal or external. But if you use any app with your samples that reads from disk... you may want to move samples from internal to external firewire to get the faster access speed. You can leave your itunes folder and music on internal as this won't make much difference for itunes unless you need hard drive space internally then through them to external if you have the room. That is what I would do but that is just my opinion

I use Logic and the ESX24 sampler with virtual memory on sampler turned on so it reads from disk... for this reason I have about a gig of samples on my external firewire 40 gig drive.

Perfect. Exactly what I was looking for - thanks, Synthetic!