Hi Folks,
 
I'm running SPLAT on an ASUS N550J notebook. Everything runs great, but hard drive space is filling up fast (yes, I'm deleting the Cakewalk downloads). I'd like to keep my various projects on external drives and work on them from there. Of course they all say that they're screaming fast in their ads. I'd love to get some recommendations (or warnings) from someone who's actually doing what I'd like to do before I spend money. The computer has three USB 3.0 ports, one of which is running a powered hub. My interface and control surface are on the other two. The built-in SD reader seemed like a great idea, but it's way too slow.
 
Any advice (including "get a real computer") would be appreciated
 
Cindy

Take a look at a WD USB 3.0 Passport Ultra, they're small, portable, port-powered, very reasonably priced, and will do the job nicely. They're USB 3.0 and fast, but backwards compatible with USB 2.0 when you need to. I use mine for backups, but I could easily run Sonar projects off of it if needed.

I have to say I'm running all my stuff of a USB2 drive and I run some pretty hefty track counts, and it works fine. I'm sure I'd get better performance with USB3 or SATA3 or something but it's doing the job.
 
I'd suggest not running them from a hub though, hook it directly up to a port so nothing is stealing bandwidth.

I'd suggest going for a 7,200rpm 3.5" drive rather than the USB bus-powered 2.5" ones.

The 2.5" USB3 drives are fine for non-time critical stuff, and can certainly stream HD video acceptably, but multi-track read/write audio in a low-latency DAW can be a different matter. Another option is an external SSD, but be aware that it isn't possible to pass the TRIM commands SSDs use to optimise themselves through USB (though Thunderbolt can handle TRIM).

And make sure an external drive is a genuinely USB3 one, not a USB2 one with marketing speak suggesting it's "USB3 compatible/ready" or similar.

+1, unless you are getting extreme with track counts, a true USB3 setup should be feasible. One thing to bear in mind is the "nemesis" of magnetic HDDs is seek time... they write in the first place they can find, then read accordingly (i.e., they will fragment the crap out of themselves). If you go that route, make it a habit to defrag that drive regularly (when empty, fragmentation is negligible; but as the drive fills weekly defrags (or at least analysis) is a good practice).

+1 for this:
I'd suggest going for a 7,200rpm 3.5" drive
 
I have been using USB 2.0 external drives that are 7200 3.5" for years without issues for BOTH live recording and use in the studio.  That being said, I don't do a lot of MIDI, it is mostly all Digital Audio so that may be an issue.
Also my track counts are sparse (typically between 16-30).
And my plug in count isn't all that high either.  I try to get the mix right with minimal processing.
 
So bottom line take my experiences with a grain of salt & wisdom!