Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 or USB drive for scratch disk

[bs-2010]

I Am soon going to be purchasing the new rMBP. I have an old 2009 mbp at the moment. I use a FireWire 800 drive as a scratch disk and for loading music samples from. For the new rMBP would it be better to get a thunderbolt to FireWire adapter and continue using my current drive, get a USB 3.0 drive, or get a thunderbolt drive?

I'm not sure of how much faster USB 3 is over FireWire...I know on paper USB 3 is superior but not sure for actual use. It is definitely most cost effective to keep on using my current Lacie 7200rpm drive and just get an adapter, but if there are great benefits for USB or thunderbolt drives then I'd like to invest in that.


or does the new ssd make loading from an external disk unecessary?

 

[ColdCase]

Your current performance bottleneck is the drive, so any of the interfaces will work just as well. I have a TB to FW adapter, its handy if you have any legacy FW drives around. Gets kinda warm, however.

As far as the future, USB3 would offer better performance with more modern high performance drives or SSDs than FW800.

TB will support more throughput with much less latency, however, but at a price. Many here use TB RAIDs and claim excellent cache drive performance, snappy software responses, as if the drives were internal.