External Or Internal Hard Drive?
Are there many benefits to running mp3’s from an external drive on a Mac??? If so, is it a good idea to use a firewire hub (or any hub for that matter) when running an external sound card & midi controller since i’d need one to hook up the external drive.
Seems simpler to just run the tunes internally but haven’t been sure of the pro’s and cons.
Thanks for any info.
If you can fit your mp3s on your internal drive its alot better, theres a much lower chance it gets disconnected which could interrupt your mix, also it uses 0 usbs port which is allways nice 
If you have a very large mp3 collection though i would suggest getting a external laptop external hard drive. The reason to buy a laptop external drive is because it can be USB bus powered, while 3.5" desktop hard drive need a power adapter 
You get less space on the laptop drive but if your only using it for your music collection its more than enough.
You can buy these ready made, that is the hard drive already in the case. In my experience though its all ways cheaper to buy an empty case and buy a quality laptop drive to put in it. That way you know your getting a quality drive in the case and you saved yourself a few $ to blow songs on beatport Putting the drive in the case is really easy and you don’t want to dp that you might even be able to get the people from the computer store to do it for you if you ask nice enough 
an external drive is just another part of the system that can fail. get a large internal drive (getting a 250gig in a few days) and a large external drive. keep all the music that you play regularly (or see yourself playing on at least a fairly regular basis) and use the external drive as a backup and an archive.
Use your internal drive and save on real estate in a cramped workspace.
Another vote for internal drive. I started out with an external drive but had to ditch the idea pretty quickly:
Cons:
Heavy & another piece of equipment to lug around
Uses us a USB port
Needs an outlet
Can be unplugged easily / another point of failure
Uses up table space + adds to the mess of cables
Pros:
Large capacity
I had it only for the load times… which didn’t seem to be that much faster, than from my internal drive, so I just use it for backups now.
I’m pretty sure I saw an interview with Richie Hawtin (or was it Sasha? hmm) and he basically carries his mp3 collection as back up on an external in case of a laptop crash - it has happened to many people and will probably happen to many more in the future. Good to be able to just plug the hd into a new laptop and have the same access.
Will packing my system with MP3’s not slow it down? I don’t have the most cutting edge system, and I find the CPU can at times start getting bunged up, even with half my internal hard disk free.