Need More Room To Load... Please Help.

I'm a bit new to my MPC1000 and a bit stuck on this, any help would be much appreciated:

Right away I installed the 128 ram and have a 2GB+ memory card - definitely have enough room to store everything but is it possible to operate the MPC straight off the memory card? I use my MPC in a live band and can't sit on stage loading programs one by one because there's not enough room on the actual device (AKA I can save as much as I want, but I can only load so much...).

I thought buying a big memory card would solve this problem but it hasn't. I see a lot online about upgrading to a bigger hard drive/disk. Would that solve my problem or would I still have to load my samples/programs, thus being too much for the internal memory all over again?

Thanks much.

128 mb (21 minutes) is the max that can be loaded into the mpc1000 at one time

the rest is just storage, can't be read on the fly.
consider trimming down your programs and/or converting stereo samples to mono.

Damn. Okay, thanks a lot for answering. And so quick. One more sub-question:

Is a bigger capacity hard drive/disk gonna be essentially the same as a big memory card?