Hi,
I would get an external ESATA drive. Technically your OS drive as long as it is a 7200 rpm drive is juts as fast as a desktop drive.
If you were juts doing audio recording then most likely juts the internal drive will be fine as long as it is 7200 rpm and a decent size.
If you are doing sample streaming and audio recording then you will probably be better off with an external drive.
But that is only if your using stuff like Kontakt, Play or VSL type libraries. If you just using loops or something like Reason then the single drive is fine.

Depending on the USB 3.0 chip you will probably get better low latency performance off of one of the USB 2.0 ports. You will have see.

The good thing about the USB 3 port as long as it works fine, is that it provides enough power to easily run the babyface without using the extra USB power connector.

Thanks Chris

Hi,
There is more than enough power and bandwidth to run these devices.
You could always look at getting a 4 port Powered USB hub to run the Mouse, Dongle or any extra devices.
Most ESATA drives now are a combo of ESATA and USB 2 or ESATA and USB 3 so you will have some flexibility in how you end up connecting it all up.

Thanks Chris

So, Babyface has arrived. Plugged it into the firewire challenged laptop ( reason I bought another, this time USB interface ). Set the buffer to 64 samples, fired up DAW, laid down a dozen tracks with wav files, played a few over it, no crackling or any other problems whatsoever, so I guess it works.

Now, bear with me; since I've always liked to keep things as simple as possible I may be somewhat digitally challenged. Question is, since I only have 2 inputs really, what's the best way to go when I want to record a stereo output from my Korg and play guitar on top of that, in stereo so requiring 4 inputs. Since I still have firewire 800 and it's already set up with multieffects and compressor loops. That all gets mixed down and sent to outputs 1 and 2 ( something I do when I try to lay down some ideas, I don't need separate tracks for these in those situations ). is it better to use ADAT cable from fireface to Babyface and mix down to stereo there, or is it better to mix down as I usually do within fireface800 mixer and just send analog 1 and 2 out to babyface? Mainly which would give me better quality from a technical point of view.

In case anybody is wondering why I need both in this setup, I can record on the other laptop using just fireface800, but I may prefer to do it on the newer one sometimes and that one unfortunately has a broken firewire port, so it has to go through Babyface.

Also, I tried the suggested* "find the best USB port to use" and as mentioned in the manual as a possibility, everything on that laptop is listed under one USB controller, and the other one has nothing listed. Is there a way to force use of the other one. I tried moving Babyface to a couple of different ports, but still shows up under the same one or not at all. Seems that external drives plugged into eSATA/USB combo and USB 3 ports don't show at all. I only have Babyface, mouse, webcam ( which I disabled ) and fingerprint reader ( also disabled ). No problems playing around so far though. I hope all that above made sense and won't roll too may eyes around here.

Finally had time to try it. Your answer was kind of what I was thinking about, but you did save me some time with sync settings. I'm sure I would have fumbled something there. I got some distortion at first, but figured out it was because of 44.1 k setting on fireface 800 and Babyface was set to 48 K. Both at 44.1K , perfect.

So, when using ADAT from Fireface into Babyface I can only use 44.1 or 48K, can't record at 96K? Not that it matters, I can't hear the difference anyway, just curious.

Thanks

May be able to get away with that. Korg coming in on ADAT 1/2  and whatever needs to be run through rack effects coming in stereo through ADAT 3/4. That second part is basically 2 microphones used for guitars or vocals. I guess unless I want to go directly with each hardware input into its own DAW track that's plenty.

Thanks again.