There are some very good reasons to use internal drives instead of external drives.

1. USB2 and FW400 drives are IDE drives with a ATA to FW/USB2 Bridge inside a box. That means you're paying for the drive, the bridge and the box. Hence, they're more expensive.

2. Additionally, the bridge bottlenecks the drive. Hence they're slower. Except possibly for FW800, which I've heard is faster than the ATA bus it bridges.

3. You might not have USB2 or FW on your computer. Of course you could always buy a PCI USB2 or FW card, and worry about IRQs and bus master conflicts

4. SATA!

5. Less desk clutter.

But there are good reasons to buy external drives too.

1. Portable and Hot Pluggable.

2. You may not have any more spare IDE connections for internal drives (or SATA connectors). Of course you could always buy a PCI IDE (or SATA) card, and worry about IRQs and bus master conflicts.

3. Your computer might not have the internal space or cooling capability to host another internal drive.

4. FW800 is fast enough not to bottleneck the drive.

5. Some people like desk clutter. Makes them think they have something!

As you can see, its a 'does it meet your needs' thing. IMO internal drives are better than external drives for audio, at least at this point. The one exception might be FW800. But I'll put it this way: a fast external drive will never be faster than the same drive inside the computer (given that its on its own ATA bus).

mitz

To add to Marks reply...IMHO, having things as delicate & sensitive as hard drives and other components, one would think to handle or take a little more care of such devices. Knowing how some of us can be sometimes, I don't think the portability thing will become a mainstay because of the risk of damage due to transporting. Having such devices moved around so often will subject them to such things as shock damage, water damage, data corruption and a few others. The new technology itself is great, but it will not take over as the defacto. We'll always have a place for our "internal" components.

My external drive just stopped working. it was fine, then bang, no more data. Luckily most of the data was still on other drives. Don't use an external drive as your sole archive! Use them as a temporary storage tool, unless you have two and archive redundantly

Obsolete???? Hahahahahahahahahahah....... talk to me after your first USB or FW drive decides not to work at a critical moment.

Not in my rig!

Bill

I've lost qite a bit of stuff to faulty hard drives... thank above for back ups! I've also had a drive crash, become totally unreachable (the data, that is) :D Unfortunately I had a few things in there without back up and I put it away for a time and had a friend tech check it out- he said that all the data was there but the directory seemed to be lost- to make a long story shorter, I put it back in the computer a few monts later and most everything was there... One partition never did show up (120 GB maxtor drive, 72000rpm divided by 8 @15 GB ea) i inmediately backed up whatever data I had "lost", reformatted the drive and have been using it for about another year now... all's well that ends well :D :D