Well, first of mall, I looked at the initial post, saw the words 'old school bebop player' and don't see any particular requirement for a sampler...

One of the strengths of the G70 is that a lot of the sounds, particularly the piano, is so good on-board, there's no need to complicate things and slow them down with a sampler. For bossa, and bebop, the G70's OOTB sound is already just about perfect. Great drums, decent percussion, great upright, great piano, great sax (but no SA - it's still one of the best, even without it). Why complicate things, or add the expense of a sampler and it's library?

My advice to the original poster would remain to just try the G70. You may not need a WS or second keyboard at all... Why complicate the task if you don't have to...?

Finally, to return to the USB thing... I'm sorry, but USB1 already outperforms the RAM pipe in hardware samplers. 1.5MB/sec is WAY faster than any contemporary arranger sampler loads up at. The T2 worked out to about .25MB/sec (four times slower than my K2500!) and I heard the Korg's were about the same. Throwing the data at the bottleneck of the RAM pipe faster doesn't shove it through the hole in any less time!

There's theoretical speed, then there's reality...

The reality is, USB2 confers NO advantage to an arranger, at the moment. But a freakin' big FlashRAM drive would! Even a USB1 FlashRAM drive (like my G70) outperforms the USB2 HD's in other arrangers because there is negligible seek times (the thing that REALLY slows down file transfer).

Many Yamaha users remark about the time it takes to pull a style off the HD (Korg is probably the same). On a Roland, this is instantaneous.

Advantage, USB1, I would say!