I have a sony laptop with an internal 1tb hard drive. I also have 2 usb hard drives. Can anybody give advice on how I can use these to improve performance? I've heard some here speak of using them with samples and obviously for file back up. Or if anybody knows of an article or tutorial that explains all of this that would be much appreciated.

First, if the external drive are USB3 they may work.  Second, do you have enough USB3 ports to plug directly into the laptop?
Using a hub may work, but you're adding overhead and may end up equally slow.