11Dreams
I've been having slow loading projects from the hard drive so I thought a external would be maybe better and faster.
If this is the issue and your setup uses a 7200RPM HD for projects, the drive is probably not the cause.
On load, SONAR reads the project file, loads plug-ins, opens audio files and reads the audio images. It does not load the audio files themselves. They stream from disk.
Project files are usually pretty small, although; if they contain a lot of audiosnap data they can get pretty big and will load slow.
Sample based plug-ins can load slow depending on the size of the sample set being loaded and whether the plug-ins loads everything in memory at once. There are some reports of Waves plug-ins loading slow, check the forum for threads about this (I believe it may be related to recent Waves updates but I do not use Waves so don't pay much attention to their issues).
If the picture cache is too small or the project is larger than the cache, it can take some time to redraw the audio pictures.
It is pretty easy to tell if any of these are the problem by watching the project load except for project size. Check project size by comparing sizes of the cwp files using Windows Explorer.