Jrides here...

Been gone for a while. WhatdidImiss? It would be nice if everyone yelled "Norm!!!" upon my return, but alas I was not a huge contributor in my day. I learned heaps, and was years ahead of my peers as far as home recording goes in my genre.Thank you ALL.

Now down to business. I have been out of the game for a while. bought a lappy to use for music, and need some questions answered. Right now I am running a Core Duo 2.0 with 2GB ram, and  a soon to be installed 200gb Hitachi 7k200.  (I remeber the roll your own days... My RYO2K is still alive and well) My situation is similar to one posed in the other thread. With the 7k200, I am considering running everything off 2 partitions like I used to do this with my RYO Celeron, but I do not remember the access times of that drive vs the new lappy drives.

My questions are...... What is the verdict on eSATA vs Firewire for audio? I have a couple of Firewire 400 external cases laying around. Do people use those for audio, or is it just the FW800? I am looking at the Antec eSATA case and am wondering if the "audio gods" have given eSATA the green light for recording. I cant seem to google much info on the subject as it pertains to audio. Whats the word?

Internal with 2 partitions

FW400 (no investment)

FW800 (requires some investment)

eSATA (requires even more investment) Worth it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I've used FW400 for playing back 16 tracks while recording 2 without any problems (all 24/44.1k). I'd guess that it could have handled more, but that's as for as I've pushed it. This was on a single core desktop, but I don't see why results would be that different on a decently fast laptop.

I've got a project coming up in mid November where I'll need to use a laptop and a USB2 drive, probably recording 8-12 tracks at once if it can handle it. I'll report back with results. The interface is the RME pcmcia card, which had a pretty low CPU overhead, so it should go relatively smoothly.