External Hard Drive through PC Express card

[Graeme]

If i had a soundcard ( http://www.dv247.com/invt/20611 ) going through one of these ( http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/spec ... NBA-ECFWU1 (http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NBA-ECFWU1) ) into my laptop through the firewire port, would adding an external hard drive ( http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/spec ... l?WD-MBE32 (http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-MBE32) ) have any affect on the soundcard performance?

+ What differance would i get by using the firewire version of the above hard drive?

[Graeme]

anyone?

[Graeme]

? ? ? ?

[djgandy]

May i ask what you are going to be doing with it? How many devices etc. The sound card will share bandwidth with the hdd, but pci-express is full of bandwidth. Depends what speed the PCI-E lane runs at on the laptop i guess assuming the plugin card isnt restricted.

Are you using the laptop as a "pc" so to speak?

[Graeme]

Thanks for the reply.

The laptop is for live mixing and producing, i dont use it for anything else.

If there isnt much differance between the usb2 and the firewire hdd would i be better off going with the usb2 version to save any problems with bandwidth from the pci port?

[djgandy]

Well that would potentially slow the hdd down. I don't know how hard drives perform under usb2 though so I can't really comment.

You aren't doing a lot though so you should be fine. I thought you might have 10 channels of audio coming in at high sample/bit rates or something like that. PCIE has 2.5GBit/s bandwidth (Equates to 250Mbyte/s usable)
You'll have trouble using all that up I think :)

There are probably priorisation tools or something if you are worried about sound clipping out, where a certain device gets priority to use the port over another. I have no idea :)