Help! I am upgrading my entire system.

Well, what you spec'ed so far sounds good.  I might add another hard drive (or two, if you can afford it) so you can at least separate the operating system and programs from your audio.  Hopefully you have read all the ins and outs about firewire, so I won't repeat it except to say to make sure you have the right chipset for it (lots of posts on this topic).  Are you going to build it yourself or buy off-the-shelf?  Good luck either way, it will be an adventure, for sure.
 
Portland, OR is one of my favorite places ... I was born there!

I also have no trouble with firewire. TI firewire chips are recommended by manufactures like Focusrite, but if necessary you can get a TI firewire chip on a PCIe board.

Your specs sound OK but as LL said you will have better luck with 2 hard drives. One to run your OS and one for .wav files, believe me it sped my comp up noticeably.

USB 3.0 is faster than firewire but its so new I'm not sure how many recording devices support that yet. Firewire is def quicker than USB.

Are you planning on using a 7200 rpm hard drive?

I’m curious as to why the 2 TB HD? 

2 smaller drives that spin quicker will also help. I use 2 ea. 10,000 HD's, one for OS and one for wavs and it runs great. Conventional wisdom is that 10,000 rpm HD's are over kill and 7200's are more than adequate but what the heck go big or go home:-)

I am a moderator on another small recording site but a Noob here, you were my first post, I'll always remember:-) LOL

Steve

Sorry about the big paragraph, the spacing that I put in my post isn't showing up in the post, My recording computer uses 2 10,000 rpms HD's and they haven't raised any temps. They come with a black heat sink adapter and I run them with a Core 2 Quad 2.4 over-clocked to 3.4. I use several temp monitoring utilities and it stays at 50-60 C at that OC. I can run stable at 3.7 but the temps bump 65-68 C which is at my comfort zone upper limit. I love ASUS boards they over clock like a beast. I am building a new recording computer right now. It wont be used for anything else and after a lot of research I went with 2 Kingston Hyper X 120 gig SSD's. They are SATA 3, have the latest Sandforce 2281 controller and are synchronous drives which are close to twice as fast as asynchronous SSD's. The 240 gig drives run faster but 2 240 gig is too rich for my blood:-) Karlie, go with the i7 2600K processor. The K version is a screaming CPU, its been bench-marked running stable at 5 gig +!!! Your choice of motherboard is as important as the the CPU and Hard drives. Do some reading on different models, I decided on and purchased an ASUS P6X58-E Pro, it will do the overclocking I want but there are many other strong boards out there. Gigabyte, ASRock (I think that's the brand name) are some other popular ones I've heard of. I also read user reviews at Newegg and Tiger direct that help me decide. Take care and have fun. Steve

That's not a bad price for what you are getting, as you probably couldn't do a build that cheap unless you already had a lot of the parts.  But, if your old computer is circa 2006, there's probably not much in there you are going to be able to use.  The only thing to verify would be:  (a) make sure the hard drive is 7200rpm, and (b) see if you can find out what speed the memory is - hopefully it's 1333MHz or better.  Other than that, the computer you spec'ed sounds pretty good.  Oh, you might check out the power supply while you are at it - look for 500 Watts or better.  These store-based system builders often go cheap somewhere, so you have to keep an eye on them!
 
As for your hard drives, from what I have seen on the forum people have pretty good luck with portable/external drives, although I don't know the specs of the units they use.  But, you could try it, and if it won't handle the load, then you know what your next purchase will be!  Also ... you could take your 150GB out of your old computer and use it or a boot drive if it's fast enough.  That's what I use, and there's plenty of room for Windows 7 and a bunch of programs, as long as you don't start storing samples and other drive-eaters on it.  That would leave your 2TB drive free for samples or audio - just a thought.

Do you know that hard drive prices have tripled in price in the past month or so. Due to some accident in some factory or something. If you wait on the extra hard drives, you might save a knickel or 2.... Just sayin.

timidi, the problem with spiking hard drive prices was due to the flooding in Thailand, where WD's manufacturing plants were located.