Hello Everyone,

This is my first time on the forum and I need some help and understanding. :)

I am a musician and composer and I have a Macbook Pro (15 inch, 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo, 4 GB 1067 DDR3) with a 250 GB internal hard drive. I am running various software packages that with their combined libraries equal around 240 GB. Obviously I can't house them on my Macbook Pro because it would slow to a crawl.

So what I need is an external solution to my problem. I just bought a 1.5 TB Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual Bay Raid 0 with FW 800 and it arrived yesterday. I haven't used it yet. In order to get some thoughts on where to put what, I posted on a mac forum I frequent (Appleinsider), and was told that a RAID 0 config was a very bad idea for longterm storage due to failure issues.

If I'm going to return it (unsure) I need another solution. I am a total newbie when it comes to external storage. The company I bought the RAID 0 drive from (OWC) suggests I buy a second 1.5 TB USB drive to backup the RAID drive. That way I keep the speed of the RAID 0 drive but also have redundancy. I would love thoughts on this or another possible solution.

As I see it, the problem is not just the capacity to store such a large library but also the transfer speeds going from my laptop to the external and back again with little latency.

I'm interested to get opinions and ideas from people here in the hope of finding a solution that works well. I'm also interested to know how I would set this up. Should I be putting the core programs on my laptop and the libraries on the external? Or everything on the external? For instance, should I put the omnisphere, Trilian and RMX synths on the laptop and their patch libraries on the external? Or all of it on the external?

I run the following:

Spectrasonics Omnisphere (42 GB)
Spectrasonics RMX Expanded (38 GB)
Spectrasonics Trilian Bass (40 GB)
NI Kore Player with 2 extra libraries (12 GB)
NI Kontakt 4 with extra libraries (8 GB)
Ministry of Rock (44 GB)
Just over 60 GB of audio loop content

I also use Recycle, and Ableton Live 8 for recording.

Average song is between 30-75 tracks. Usually 10 or so audio tracks and the rest MIDI tracks, with full effects processing across all tracks.

Any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Ryan