How do I go about converting my everyday MBP into a recording only system?

So what exactly is your problem? I'd just try record your music on your LOCAL harddrive. This should work just fine. I use a MBP and MP for recording and Logic Pro, never had problems with recording onto the local disc. Also to record music, you can keep your personal stuff on your mac

 

"HOW do I go about still maintaining my files backed up in TIME MACHINE while strictly keeping my laptop for recording and keeping the large files on my laptop?"

I have an iMac (older "white" version), not a MacBook Pro.

My solution for audio recording onto the primary (internal) drive was to _partition_ the internal drive, creating a few small (8-16gig) partitions in addition to the larger "system partition".

Each small partition contains an "audio project", and nothing more.

This way, all the sound and other info created by the digital audio workstation software goes to the project partition, and doesn't get scattered amongst the other data on the drive.

With a small partition, I can also use defrag software to quickly "clean up" the audio and get everything into contiguous files, without touching the rest of the drive.

It's also easier to back up the projects -- I just copy my project folder to a flash drive after working on it.

I record only 2 channels at once, and never had a problem with latency or the drive not being able to "keep up". I'm guessing one could do 4, or maybe even up to 6 channels. I can understand that my scheme might not work with truly heavy-duty recording. But for lighter-duty, it works just fine.

 

Dude, definitely record to an external drive. Leave your internal drive to handle the DAW & plugins... for an external drive FW is fine but make sure you have a 7200rpm instead of 5400.

Myself I go w/ Glyph and have zero issues; its a great unit. You can get larger ones but this one is very portable and you can even run it off eSATA for the data and power it off FW if you like. I run the whole thing off FW w/o any issues.
http://www.glyphtech.com/products/portagig/

Trust me its a much better solution if you do any extensive recordings.

 

What are the specs on the FW800 drive. The FW interface is certainly fast enough. Possible you have a very slow disk drive on the end of that FW cable?

Next question: How many tracks are you recording? 2 or 16? What setting is it 16-bit or 24, What sample rate?

Also you really should kill every process that is not involved in recording. Turn off networking, blue tooth and

About backups. If you care about the data Time Machine is only a start. You need some more redundancy and some off site backup too. Remember a major cause of lost data is not a failed disk drive. It's loss of the equipment by fire, theft or whatever.

 

Yeah, this is what I do. 1 partition for system, 1 partition for most of my files (that I keep on my laptop anyway), and 1 partition to keep clean for recording.

I have done 16-18 channel 44.1KHz/24bit recordings onto my internal drive (the clean recording partition. This was with a high buffer size (2048 samples I think?). I can't remember, but last summer I was doing at least 6 channel recording with 64 sample buffers to the internal drive. I'm not sure how other software handles this, but one thing I like about Digital Performer is it has meters showing HD and CPU use statistics while you record, so if you watch those it gives you an idea if the settings, track count, and HD you are recording to are working out. I used to be of the perspective that when using a laptop, you should be using an external drive to record to, but I started using the internal when one of my externals went bad and have had no problems since (some of those 16-18 channel recordings were live and there was no chance for retakes if there was a hardware glitch--using the internal drive itself doesn't not make me nervous, but anything can happen with technology in a live situation and I really need to get a backup 2-channel mix going on with separate hardware when I'm doing live recordings to be on the safe side).

Yeah, I often turn off airport, dashboard, spotlight, and everything in the sharing preference pane. If you want to free up every available cycle, depending what else you have installed on your system, you could have other processes worth killing via Activity Monitor.