[LAU] New laptop - advice needed

Hi I'm replacing my lenovo X61s (dualcore 1.6Ghz) laptop, mostly due to a hard drive that's starting to fail and need some advice. I'm having problems finding something that has the right balance between specs and price *and* has firewire. This means I might have to replace my Edirol FA-66 with an USB based sound card. Will I be able to get low latancy (<10ms) and reliable performance from an USB sound card? Any suggestions for a sound card (minimum 4in (2 of these should be phantom power) + 4out) what will provide zero-latency monitoring and work out-of-the-box with linux? Right now I'm leaning towards a Lenovo IdeaPad U310 core i7, with 500GB HD + 24GB SSD, the idea would be to install the system on the SSD and have the data sit on the slower HD: http://laptops.dk/product_info.php?cPath=203&products_id=4875 Any reasons this would be a bad/good choice? -- Atte http://atte.dk http://modlys.dk