My first mix-CD came out pretty good! I made some silly newbie mistakes like using compressed WMA and also had a few skips (barely noticeable) but overall it sounded pretty cool!

My dell xps laptop has a spiffy 7200rpm drive so in terms of performance, its great. I don't want to clutter/fragment/fill my disk though, so I was thinking why not get an external drive? Of course, performance is going to be worse but I'd trade slower speed for a larger, more manageable workspace.

Questions:
1) has anyone done this? what was your experience? Did you have issues other than just slower performance?
2) Is firewire a good option? Or stick with USB2.0?

Thanks!

barely noticeable




Hmmmm define barely :-)

IMO I would certainly have an external drive for backup and there is merit in having your temp file on a 2nd drive (if the throughput is fast enough).

I would use firewire (800 if you can) rather than USB

BTW I'm a big fan of 10k rpm drives for AA

You don't mention how big your current drive is but I suspect that you wouldn't have enough concurrent projects that they wouldn't clutter up that drive. Just move them to the 2nd drive when they are complete and do regular defrags.

Thanks for the response! Yeah I figured firewire would be the way to go. My current drive is 86G, single volume with 30G+ free. Do you think its maybe better to create a 5 or 10 G partition to use as my workspace? And then use the external drive for non-critical workspace backup?

My usage should be minimal..maybe 1-2 mix CD's a month at most. But maybe I will get more into using Audition in the coming months..

barely noticeable Well its like 2-3 half-second skips scattered over a
35 min CD, so short you just wonder if you did hear a skip or if it was
your imagination

There is no advantage to partitioning as far as AA's temp files because it is still the same physical read/write head

There are 2.5"" 10k rpm laptop drives like the VelociRaptor <http://techreport.com/articles.x/14583>

Isn't there the advantage (for creating a workspace partition )that your main OS volume will not get as fragmented? But you're right, still same disk and read/write head.

Another question - how about using an 8G USB flash drive if you don't need to save all your work (ie create a CD, clean flash before making next CD, etc) ? I know those have limited read/write but for <$20 they are a steal. Writing to flash would be faster too so I wonder if theres considerable speed gain too. But of course the USB transfer speed is the weakest link there right?

If you are looking to backup your data a flash drive is better than nothing - flash is a bit of a misnomer they aren't that fast :-)

I would also download the free SyncToy backup software it excellent.

If you aren't going to get a bigger (& faster) hard drive then free up disk space by discarding unused files from your sessions <http://mediasweeper.com.au> and backup & defrag regularly.

Thanks for the reply - I should clarify the intent, its not for backup. It is more a scratch-space which will not clutter my main harddrive, thats what I was looking for. 8G sounds like plenty of room to make mix CD's even using WAV files? I should do the math and check it out.

If it is for a "scratch-space" I would just use the hard drive as its faster and clean up afterwards

the fastest external drives are E-SATA
if you have a spare PCMCIA slot you can get an E-SATA (1.5Gb/s) PCMCIA card, which will run way faster than 1394a-firewire (400Mb/s), USB (480Mb/s), & 1394b-firewire (800Mb/s);

if your PCMCIA bus is fast enough you can get an E-SATA card that will run at the SATA II (3.0Gb/s) spec.