lets say i'm sat on a mountain, eating a nice sandwich, and happen to have my macbook and metric halo 2882, mics etc.

then this 2 foot long cricket comes along starts making this awesome racket, and a kimodo dragon jumps out of the bushes and attacks it, this enormous fight insuse and i want to record it.

can i use a macbook/pro and a metric halo running off the bus power, but would the internal HD be fast enough to record up to 8ch of audio? (surround or multi channel etc) 96k/24, am i dreaming?

what about if i got an external firewire drive? how would i power it. stike

It depends on what kind of sandwich it is.

8 channels of audio is really not that much to be recording, even at 96/24. The problem with just using one hard drive is that if you are writing those 8 files all at once, while reading the programs that you are running off the same disk, then maybe you could run into problems.

There are plenty of bus powered hard drives out there, if you want to go that way, just pick one. Here's one from LaCie (http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10833) that would do the trick, there are some firewire ones out there if you must have firewire, but USB 2.0 is *technically* faster than firewire 400. Not trying to start a debate over the two.

Either way, 8 channels is not a lot, i would calculate that you would need a sustained 18.5 (ish) Mbps write to your disk (24 bits/sample * 96000 samples/sec * 8 channels). Most 5400 rpm drives (assuming your laptop is one of those or higher) shouldn't have trouble doing that for extended periods of time.

nice thanks, i'll look into the Lacie.

oh, yes it would most likely be a:
Bacon
Egg
Tomato
on Wholegrain sandwich.

would that help?