I've done it with a G4 powerbook and a FW800 Lacie 160Gb drive from memory it had an 8ms seek time. Once they spin up, they are fine, watch stopping to save between tracks in case the band starts again too fast!

The reason I picked the 800 is my audio card was on the 400 bus. If you are planning this my gut instinct would be that USB2 would not be fast or steady enough (i think it doesn't stream at constant rate as well - anybody confirm this?) and you would want a laptop with the FW800 bus to be secure. FW400 maybe.....maybe.

I am a big fan of getting an external casing like from OWComputing and then being able to pop in drives later, it saves money down the road especially if you go through a lot of drives. You can go on DealMac.com and look up drives also they had a deal that you can buy an internal Drive 300 GB for 100 bucks which is dirt cheap. I am at school which being able to get cheap HD space is ideal because I probably go through about 10-20 GB a week, depending on projects and work, I also back up everything, and do a fair amount of audio suite plug ins just because I have a G4 powerbook so not to much processing power.

Your hypothesis is sound! (Pun intended) me and my constituents frequently use external FireWire hard drives with our computer-based music and video systems, it's the only way to go! It also makes backing up very easy, which you should do anyhow. So when you're done tracking, you plug in the second FireWire drive and transfer all the files to the second drive for safety sake.

Rubbing two sticks together will not help
Ms. Remy Ann David

Thats a nice idea.....I knew you could do it with SCSI or IDE if you were daring, but is this box you're talking about a built-in Firewire interface?

I buy the Lacies because I don't use them for audio, I use them for transport and the sealed units dont let in sand, grit, moisture etc. As a point of note they were I believe the only drives which survived the BBC's war coverage in Iraq without mechanical failures.