Internal or external hard drive better?

[xenophilic]

My MacBook occasionally has hiccups (brief sound dropouts). I have an external drive connected through firewire, and I'm feeding a DAC via USB. I suspect two things: 1) the system has some processes running that occasionally overtax the I/O and cause a dropout, and 2) moving data in from firewire and back out through the USB can create hiccups.

 

I suspect that #1 is the most likely culprit, but I am also considering upgrading to a bigger internal drive so that the music is playing off of the internal boot drive vs. the external.

 

Is running the music off of an internal drive a bad idea? If this is the boot drive (which the system will periodically want to access for its own purposes) am I going to cause more problems?

 

Any experience or guidance would be helpful before I do the hardware change.

 

Many thanks.

 

[Olive Empithrie]

Sounds like a latency issue. Or, you could try using another USB port

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/USB-Port-Not-USB-Port

 

Playing off the internal drive should be no problem. Make sure you keep your music backed up somewhere else though in case your internal drive crashes ;-)

 

OE

 

 

 

 

[shenzi]

Running external shouldn't be a problem, especially as the HD and DAC aren't sharing the same bus. OTOH running from the boot drive is okay too - I'm doing it all the time here on an older and probably slower Powerbook.

 

If it's the original MacBook, upgrading the hard drive is very easy so you could just use the external for backup.