Track to external drive, I know.. but also a must when mixing?

I plan to buy a new MacBook Pro and a LaCie FW800 external drive for my audio when tracking.
Is it necessary to also have this configuration when mixing, or could I bring the files back to my 320GB 7200 RPM system drive for that (and get to leave the LaCie drive at home on those days?)
Or, is it necessary/critical/important to always have the audio files on the non-system drive wheteher tracking OR mixing?
Thanks!

I'm interested to see if others respond to this post. noeq is a longstanding and valuable member of this forum, but I have to respectfully disagree with him on this one.
For mixing and other non-recording tasks one may want to perform, there is no reason why you can't do that stuff off of an internal drive. One could potentially argue that the harder you tax your HD, the shorter its overall lifespan will be. But if we all drove our cars at 5mph, they'd probably last forever too! These computers and drives are plenty fast to do a lot of processor and HD intensive computing without a blip. I would say absolutely yes you can mix from your internal. Again, if you're running audio from an external like noeq is suggesting, you will have an optimized set-up. But don't let that keep you from taking projects out and about with you. If you did then what would be the point in having a laptop??
I'll even go as far as to say that while you will get better performance out of tracking to a non system drive, a 7200 speed internal HD with a newish MBP can handle recording a few tracks just fine. If you're tracking someplace where you can have the external, by all means use it. But if you need to lay down a couple tracks to the internal it'll work just fine. I do it all the time.
Good Luck!

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