Using an external hard drive for VSTs?

I recall seeing something about this somewhere, obviously VSTs take a lot of space so if you can drop $150 on a nice external hard drive with a TB of space this would free up your regular hard drive for the rest of your life. Is this possible? Is there any lag? Should I look for something in particular such as firewire or is USB fast enough.

Comp Specs:

2.00 GHz processor

3 GB Ram

32-bit OS (Vista SP 2)

Thanks for the help

I would probably go for firewire, mainly because its like 4 times faster or something like that than USB2... here is one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136282&cm_re=500gb_external_hard_drive_raid-_-22-136-282-_-Product

although that is 2 500GBs RAIDed, which is actually faster than having 1tb, because instead of looking for 1 piece of information within 1000 gigs worth of stuff, it only has to look at 1 500 gig at a time, or something haha I forget a lot of stuff in my A+ class... anyway I do know that RAIDed hard drives are faster. go for that one... PLUS it's mirrored, which to my understanding when it mirrors its really hard for you to loose your data at all, as long as the whole thing isn't filled to the brim.

best of luck!

Mathieu

Stay away from USB harddrives at all costs, they just don't have the read/write speed to keep up with intense sample loading. If you're worried about getting the best performance from your samples though, your best bet is to stick with internal and split your libraries over 1 or two dedicated drives. Almost all decently-new computers come with at least two internal harddrive bays, and it's not really that expensive. In my setup, for example, I have my main harddrive with software and files, and two dedicated sample drives — my sample libraries are split between the two, which means that when a project is streaming samples, it's not loading them all from one harddrive and then writing the data back to that same drive. It's loading part of the samples from one drive, part from another, and writing the data back to my main "files" harddrive. I get wonderful performance with this setup and am less worried about the lifespan of my drives since I'm taxing them less severely. If you shell out the extra dough for 10,000rpm drives for the samples, then you'll get even better performance in terms of sample loading, but it's not necessary — 7,200 is generally fine.

That's my experience, but feel free to go external if you're not loading that many samples or samples that are particularly large.

If you're sticking your VST plugins themselves on the external, that should be fine. But if you're putting the samples (the big bit) on the external, then Marius is right.

Internals are cheaper and better. The only excuse for using an external is if you're DJ'ing on a laptop or something.