Oh one more question.. not sure if its a stupid question or not.. i notice macs have a port called "thunderbolt" which is apparently "20 times faster than USB 2.0" according to there website.. is there a way to connect ns7 thru that port or is it only able to connect thru usb 2.0?

Hardware has to be specifically designed to use Thunderbolt. In my opinion? No DJ controller will /ever/ use it, USB has pretty much won out as being the universal interface.

Maybe some niché players, but even the CDJs just took it directly to networking/cat-5 cables.

Besides, DJ controllers really don't send that much data. So the benefit of "20 times faster" are really not relevant.

As far as your original question is concerned? As long as you have free space, you're fine, generally speaking. It's when you don't that you run into problems :).

Some people advise having about 10% of disk space free. In your case, 750GB - 10% (75GB) = 675GB, so if you only have ~600GB of media you'd be fine even then.

Sounds Good, Thanks For Response.

I just got a MBP 15" with the 500gb HD at 7200 RPM and it REALLY gets hot. If I did it again, I would go SSD (Solida State Drive) internal and a nice Firewire 800 external. Keep the lappy cool and you can keep you library mobile. I have the Lacie Rugged 500gb 7200 RPM using the FW800 to free up a USB port and for the speed.

The SSD would be worth the price and the smaller internal space, IMO.

Good luck!

+1 one for external drive and Firewire 800 - you free up your USB resources and not tax them so much as well as the heat generated from going internal - I've done this since the birthing of Serato and ITCH and have not had any issues with external HD. Had one issue with the Xone:DX and external USB drive once at a live gig and have never used USB drives since - just my personal taste and experience so take it as you will.

As others have mentioned, you cannot directly connect any MIDI controller to Thunderbolt right now. And frankly, none of them need the bandwidth, either. USB2 is plenty. There will eventually be Thunderbolt to USB/Firewire/tincanandstring adapters, if you get to a point where you need additional ports for your laptop. There are also a couple external drive enclosures for Thunderbolt, but none of them are portable-oriented at the moment; they are RAID devices.

As to the question about internal disc vs. external disc... The internal disc will be the fastest on the system, and have the lowest CPU/etc overhead to access. If you go external, both Firewire and USB have more bandwidth than any file you will need to read from external media. However, Firewire will have less CPU overhead since it can do the transfers as DMA, whereas USB is a serial polling device.

Ultimately, all three should work just fine. I've used all three formats with ITCH on my early 2008 MacBook Pro (2.6GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM -- hardly a modern machine by today's standards ) The main reason people use external is for portability. You can move your library between machines easily; just hook up the external and away you go. If you don't need that kind of flexibility, then keeping it on the internal drive makes porting around to gigs much easier since you don't have the additional external enclosure to worry about.

Thanks for the response guys, i actually just picked up a seagate GoFlex Slim external drive its a performance drive @ 7200 rpm for mac and pc usb 3.0 + usb 2.0..& imma try out the firewire route and since i figured ill probably be going from mac to pc occasionally back and forth i figured ill stick with the external for now and leave the hard drive memory alone.

hopefully everything works out okay, haven't giving anything a good test yet. :)

Yeah I also have a Firewire 800 external drive (Iomega 500GB eGo Mac Edition) setup as an iTunes library. Frees up a USB port and transfers are pretty fast. Can't complain.

Finally a thread that somewhat answers my question. What if you want to analyze your songs on your external and save all your cue points etc. onto the drive and use the drive while playing, without using the internal drive ? How do I also transfer my itunes playlists onto my external HD.

Thanks, hope someone still refers to this thread.