is there a performance benefit to an external audio drive?

[ted demen]

since the days of IDE drives, it has been a fact that there was performance increase with using two seperate drives; one for system/programs and another for audio/samples.
this was mainly because while the system drive which constantly reads and writes data quickly back and forth... it is not interrupted from a constant intake stream of sample reading (which was taken care of with the other IDE channel and a dedicated audio drive)

but is still the case with SATA?
and especialy in a laptop where one is forced to go through the firewire/usb bus to add a secondary drive and
or maybe the exception is using eSATA? (or does the bus still bottleneck the performance?)

my question is primarily focused from the performance point of view, and NOT the security point of view (where it will always be beneficial to store data on a secondary drive in case the primary drive dies; however this can be rectified by simply backing up your work on a frequent and regular basis especially since the secondary drive is just as prone to dying as is the primary)

[Igotsoul4u]

From what I can tell, eSATA should be the fastest on paper but I havn't been able to try it out yet personally.