I work with a laptop and with a M-Audio Firewire 410, win xp pro sp2, 2 gb, hdisk sata 120 gb.
is better to install on an external disc (i want to buy a Lacie Mobile Drive 160 gb usb 2.0) all the vst intruments, samples etc, so as to keep “clean” the o.s. disk?
I work with Renoise and Cubase and some external hardware synth.
what do you suggest?
I would suggest that you install VSTs on your laptop’s internal harddrive. Programs can occasionally behave strangely when they are not installed on the main drive, especially if your external drive letter happens to change sometime in the future. It’s quite simple to tell Windows that you want the external drive to only use a fixed drive letter, but sometimes when Windows is in a “funny” mood it will ignore that and give it a new drive letter anyway, especially if you are frequently plugging/unplugging a memory card reader, or an mp3 player over usb, or your cellphone, etc. So that’s quite a pain in the ass when all you want to do is make some music, and in my experience it’s easiest to just avoid it altogether by keeping all your applications and VSTs on your main drive.
Storing samples on your external drive should be no problem at all, and in fact I do this myself with my huge breakbeat collections 