Should I use my G5 iMac systemdrive or ext. drive for audio?

[tonfabrik]

Hi,

I've been using my G5 iMac 2GHz system drive (400GB) to store everything on my computer, including my Ableton Live 6 projects, samples and everything else (I know... bad idea). The internal drive is a SATA so transfer rate is 1.5GB/s, wheras I also have an external Firewire 400 EIDE drive I could attach to the computer.

My question is, which will be faster - on the one hand it's always recommended to use a separate drive for audio, as the system drive is doing OS stuff at the same time as playing my audio, but on the other hand, my system drive is a lot faster (1.5GB/s) than my external drive (400Mbit/s) so which is going to give better performance?

Or has someone come up with another way to get fast external storage on a G5 iMac (2nd Gen) which only has Firewire 400, USB2 (no FW800). I am assuming that partitioning my system drive will not give any benefits.

Also, if I move my sample library, will all my Ableton projects need to search for their samples? Any way to prevent this?

Thanks for any help!

[DJ VAKIS]

Your internal drive is big enough to store everything.So use the external for backups.

[tonfabrik]

Are you having a laff? Don't mean to be unkind but that's got to be the most pointless answer ever. This is a matter of performance - whether I would get better performance in Live 6 running my samples and recorded audio from an external drive as opposed to using a system drive which then has to work extra hard to play/record audio at the same time as performing any system tasks. I only ask because the internal drive is so much faster than a FW400 drive and that's where I need the advice of someone who has compared performance between the two methods. That's the whole point - and the system drive isn't big enough for everything. That's why I'm asking about external drives. If it were just about capacity like you say, I wouldn't need to ask any questions! Anyone got any serious answers please? Cheers