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Hi,Up until now, I've been running Logic Studio and all plug-ins off of the same internal HD on my iMac G5. Although I keep looking at the Mac Pros , I am trying to resist and keep costs down!In the near future, I would like to buy a couple of sample libraries which will be too much for my current spec to deal with. From reading various articles/posts - it seems that it is a good idea/popular to keep sample libraries on a different drive anyway? I'm thinking that I should get an external firewire drive and I was wondering if anybody can recommend one or confirm that this set up would be best in these circumstances? I have already upgraded to the 2GB RAM which is as much as these iMacs can take but as for adding libraries.....I'm thinking about a separate drive now......I hope the process is relatively painless? - otherwise....I'll be back in here very soon! Would be great to get any feedback on anything that I should be aware of?! - I know some of you have lots of gear - mentioning no names (Mazz) Thanks and all the best,Rachel

The gear hound speaks......OOOOWWWWOOOOOOOOO.............I've seen 750G external drives for around 200 bucks, maybe a little more for Firewire. As far as hooking it up to the Mac, it should just work right out of the box. You don't need to buy one formatted for Mac, you can format it when you hook it up using Disk Utility. If you don't plan on ever hooking it up to a PC then you can format it for Mac and off you go. I would recommend putting all of your sample libraries on the external drive. If you can afford it, you can get a second drive for recording your audio tracks to. You'd still leave Logic and the Plug-ins on the internal drive, you'd just do all your libraries and audio tracks externally.There may be some issues with Firewire Audio interfaces and external drives living on the same Firewire bus. I don't use FW audio interfaces so I can't speak to that but it would be worth checking out just in case. Maybe Nick will have an answer for that.Good luck!!Mazz

Listen to Mazz. I just got a nice LaCie 500 that can do eSATA, FW800, FW400 and USB 2.0. Nice and speedy. $150. Set up is painless. Disk Utility. Done.

Check out Neptune drives from OWC. ArkJack

I'm with Stick, get a drive with all modern flavors of interfaces as he mentioned. It's inexpensive compared to even 2 years ago.

Thank you very much for all your replies.Just a quick question with regards to recording audio to an external drive:- is this practiced mainly for performance issues or safety (eg, in case your HD dies) or both? I guess you still need to back things up anyway. I can see how it would also keep things organised but it's nice knowing the main reasons why things are carried out the way they are. As I said, so far I have done everything "from within" but I don't own any nice libraries "yet". To date, I have used a USB 2.0 external drive to back up/take a copy of the whole Mac HD but it's nice hearing how more experienced people are set up and why. "Gear Hound" - definitely a song title ! ......"You lack the knowledge?, you lack the sound?, well shuffle on over to the mighty Gear Hound" Thanks again. Rachel

LaCie D2 is the way to go!!

RLC, It's all about the performance. Backup is a completely different issue, and obviously one that should be addressed. USB is fine for backup, or DVDs or both. (That's what I do, one copy stays on a hard drive, and one backed up to DVD.)

O.K - thanks a lot Stick - I do need to do everything possible to optimize performance as I think I may be pushing this iMac to its limit in the very near future Thanks to everyone again - I will look at the above products and hopefully be set up soon with some nice new sample libraries Best wishes,Rachel

I'd stay away from USB on Macs - it just doesn't work all that well. FireWire is great, so is eSATA if you have a card.