Hi,

I am going to add an external hard drive to my computer which I intend to use primarily for recording music in a home recording studio. My computer is running Winpows XP. Do I need to copy my XP operating system onto my new external hardrive in order to run programs and record using the external drive or will my current operating system run both drives without my having to do anything beyond merely copying over my recording programs to the external drive so that I can record using the external hard drive.

Many thanks,

marklyon

No they don't. As long as the hard drive is using a file structure recognized by Windows (ie. NTFS or FAT32) then it should show up automatically in Windows Explorer as you plug in the external hard drive.

Windows software, e.g. the recoding programs must reside on C:\ The recordings themselves can reside on the external drive.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by marklyon

Hi,

I am going to add an external harddrive to my computer which I intend to use primarily for recording music in a home recording studio. My computer is running Winpows XP. Do I need to copy my XP operating system onto my new external hardrive in order to run programs and record using the external drive or will my current operating system run both drives without my having to do anything beyond merely copying over my recording programs to the external drive so that I can record using the external hard drive.

Many thanks,

marklyon

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Thanks for the answers but I am I am still a bit confused. I am hoping to be able to record using the external hard drive as my C drive is quite full and am hoping that I could put the recording programs onto the external drive, which has 250 free gigabikes of free space, which I hope would, in turn, allow my recording programs to run faster and better than they might on the C drive. Is what I am thinking impossible or am I misunderstanding the answer I have received?

Again, many thanks,

marklyon

Windows likes to put things in c:\Program files. Let's leave it as that there MAY be issues if the programs are located on the external drive.

Programs generally load into RAM and thus having the program exist on an external drive generally doesn't buy you much. In fact it may run slower.

The external drive will probably be slower. Interfaces ranked from highest to lowest transfer rate (speed): eSATA, Firewire 800, USB2, Firewire 400. The drive RPM also has an effect too.

Since this is a recording Studio, I would suggest an eSATA drive.

Putting the programs on the external disk shouldn't be a problem. I have done the same thing many times (I do recordings of live shows) Just make sure you don't try to run any program on the hard drive without it plugged in. ( It freezes the computer!)

I would not recommend putting the programs on the external drive. But with the programs on the local drive, you can still record to the external.

Just connect the external hard drive and start recordings
That all