Okay one last post for anybody watching this topic. Went out and got a cheap USB drive. Acomdata hybridrive 160GB. I must quibble because of the annoying software preinstalled on a permanent CD image on the drive. Also annoying I had to re-activate several windows services my OTHER drive doesnt need just to get this one working. LAME
Well the long and short of it is 8 tracks in and out simultaneously at 88.1/24. I can probably do more since the disk meter is only hitting 7-8%! So yeah Ricoh 1394 chip seems okay.
Rock on...
PS all the online reviews say the disk light on the acomdata is too bright. Well its bright but not epileptic seizure-ville.

ORIGINAL: calaverasgrandes
one minor note. Lenovo has some little adware or something installed in this notebook which always switches the homepage back to theirs no matter how many times I switch it. Stupid. That pretty much guarantees I will be annoyed by that and resolve to never buy anything from them again. It did and I have.

well i'll make it a point not to buy their laptops then. there's really not a lot of good stuff out there for audio when it comes to big-name laptops. i love dell latitudes for business but i doubt they are anything special for audio. i wonder if anyone has tried those though...

just so you know i got a western digital "mybook" 250gb drive, it has one utility on there which was very useful and so i copied it off and then reformatted NTFS. you should be able to reformat your drive too.