Technical qu. about which VSTs to run from an external drive

[petermidi]

Hi there,
I hope someone may be able to help with this.
I'm out of space on my laptop hard drive - a 7200 rpm 60GB Hitachi number - which I'm told is still the largest 7200 drive you can get for my (any) laptop.
So I've got an identical drive hooked up via usb2 (the place I bought it from said that usb2 should be faster than firewire....but that's another question!).

Now I have to decide which/how many of my vsts can run ok from the external drive - and I can start by trial and error - but I'd love to start from some knowledge about how they work ie, if they load samples into RAM, surely it makes no difference (well only on the load time) which drive they start from. Whereas, if they run direct from the disk, then being on the usb2 will make a difference.

So, my softsynths are Reason, Atmosphere, East West's EWQSLO and Bosendorpher, and Vocaloid.

Can anyone suggest/has anyone had experience of which ones do well with their libraries on an external drive - and even better - explain why?!

Also, the place I bought the external drive from said I was daft to get a 7200 external drive because the usb2 is the limiting factor - does that sound right. They were not musos!

thanks a lot

Peter from Oz