Thanks everybody for continued interest and information.  I LOVE this forum.

Rob

Most synths (DP) load samples to ram, so, unless space is an issue, only streaming samples need a separate disk.

Esata should be little different than sata, with respect to speed. But, this depends upon the electronics used in the external drive.

And: some external USB drives actually use 5k rpm IDE disks.

Good to know, that when you discover the fire, you can grab just one small box to preserve you posterior.

But, I recommend an internal disk just for convenience. Not having another external connection is good.  Then use the Esata for backups, and offsite storage.

To all, I DID have a solid state drive, a 512GB screamer 6.0 gbs transfer.

It died!  That's the 2nd time one of those has bit the dust on me.

So, this time when it screwed the pooch for me, rahter than replace it with another one, I just got a 2 TB SATA 6.0 gbs regular drive, and took the $800 in savings and bought myself a 46" HDTV to use as my main PC display.

I don't have ANY issues with speed using the regular drive, and at this point would NOT spend the money to go out and get any more of them.  Maybe someday, but for now regular drives are plenty fast enough.

Bob Bone

Well in terms of using the future of sampling NOW, Just the violins alone from Dimension strings can throw down 32 Voices per key, so throw in Velocity crossfading and cell crossfading, release notes, legato portamento samples, the 'Spinning Junk' drives just can't keep up. Besides with the SSD drives you can load 10x as many samples into your RAM 10x as fast (using less pre-cache or pre-load). Certainly a necessity for me right now. I put the ENTIRE orchestra on stage/stages/studios in VEP/MIR and position them in any direction 360o, then place the mics (conductor is my fav). The violas, cellos, bass's will be out next year totaling over 1,000,000 samples just for the string section. Complete individual control over each musician. even breathing, coughing and multi-velocities of browsing thei music and positioning and un-positioning their instruments. Amazing! :) For me, 'spinning Junk' TOO SLOW! The Blogopherianman moves fast.