which drive to record Reaper audio files to ?

I'm using a PC laptop with a TI Expresscard firewire connected to an Echo Audiofire 8 interface and generally recording 6 to 8 simultaneous line in sources from an external mic preamp. Should I be writing these files to the laptop's internal drive, or to an external hard drive ? I have a few of these latter drives, with both USB 2.0 and Firewire connectivity. I could easily daisy chain one of the Firewire drives with my Audiofire interface. So which path represents the least resistance (or likelihood of datastream dropout for several hours of continuous recording): the internal laptop drive, or sending it out to a USB 2.0 or FW hard drive ? I believe there can be problems with IRQ resource sharing if I am using both Firewire and USB at the same time ? How about hard drive fragmentation of these respective storage possibilities, should they all be defragged before a recording session ? Thanks for any helpful advice !! Ray

Recording a number of files simultaneously has them pretty well fragmented in the first place. Defrag one of your externals and drag the recorded files over, and by the magic of computers, instant file defrag. The only thing I don't recommend is to use an external drive that powers down every few minutes. I recently killed a WD My Book and certainly won't be buying one of those again. Steve

This is my impression Generally speaking you should avoid writing audio files to the same physical drive as the operating system. If you have huge sample libraries i/e superier drummer, BFD etc that you are constantly accessing samples from, its best that it is not on the same phyiscal drive as the OS or the one your writing audio files to. If this is not possible, then put the samplers on your OS drive and write audio to the seperate drive.

The best possible is to have an OS drive, a sample drive and another to record to. Not always possible, especially on a laptop. For recording only 6-8 track at once, the laptop internal, even if it's the 5400 rpm variety, will be more than fine, so that's what I recommend. Will save headache and possible problems as every little single piece of hardware you connect to a system is a potential cause of problems. The discussion would be different if we were talking 30-40 simultaneous tracks, but we are far from that.

FWIW, I have about 150 hours of recording on laptop, all on internal drive, all multitracks, from two to height tracks simultaneous, without a single glitch, not "not many", not a single one. OTOH, I can't use my stationary workstation to record if my external backup drive is turned on, even if I'm not recording to it. The OS will typically access the drive every 10-20 minutes, for what reason I don't know, and freeze the computer other process for a second or two, including any audio recording that might be going. That's no glitch, that's a second or two of missing audio on the recording. Moral to the story, test the crap out of any solution you want to go with before showing up to a real event with it.