2nd hard drive questions

Consensus is 3 hard drives is best. one for OS and programs, one for Audio/projects and one for samples. So if you can afford it add a couple of drives if you want to optimize performance.

The sample drive location depends a lot on how the samples are being used. Basically there are applications that load a subset of the sample library into memory and serve them up from there, and applications that do real time streaming of the samples from the hard drive as they are called. The former benefit more from more memory, and not much from the location or speed of the drive they are loaded from, the latter from a dedicated ultrafast hard drive or SSD.

In a two drive system, the second drive should have the audio/project data recorded to it, as this is mission critical. If you flub a sample load, you can usually get a do over, freeze some tracks etc and not lose any irreplaceable data. Live recording of a performance is a one shot deal.

thanks for the tips USB drive?

I only use external drives for backups, but in that role at least USB 3 is many times faster. If you need to go external use either USB 3 or eSATA over USB2.