Does it worth upgrading to Firewire from USB?

I have about 3 new USB 3 hard drives, now I switched to Mac, I can only use USB 2 interface. Does it worth upgrading to Firewire?
These are Western Digital 3TB units. I know Firewire is double the speed of USB 2 on paper but whats the real life speed difference?

yes if you use the FW800, for example. I backup my Aperture lib to two drives one is a FW800 and the other is a USB (both WD's)

The FW is around two hours quicker (Aperture lib is 920 GB)

Same for my iTunes lib (around 1.3 TB) it takes about 14 hours with FW800 and around 17 hours on USB

note I say "about" as this is the remain time shown by the finder as the copy starts, I tend to set them going when I get home from work so by the morning they are finished. I have not sat at my machine and watched them. All I can say is the FW800 is always finished before I go to work the next day, the USB will hot have finished and always say a few hours left to copy if I check it before I go to work.

If your moving around a few Gig at a time it maybe not that much. If you want to run your photos from the external drive then FW800 is a big YES over USB

Thanks! Yes I guess I need to upgrade.

If you are planning to upgrade...go with thunderbolt ....if your mac has thunderbolt port. They are expensive but much faster than USB , FireWire etc.

Yup I got a thunderbolt port but the disk prices are $400 vs $780. Almost double. What I may do, get a 6TB Firewire drive and a smaller thunderbolt to work from.

depends...what do you want to use the drives for? i use a usb2 drive for the time machine backup stuff, works fine. if it breaks (and it's showing signs of breaking) i'd switch to a firewire drive, but i'm not doing it while this one is working.

FireWire drives are not cheap either

What kind of Mac? Macbook has an Express slot for an Express card. You may be able to find an expresscard that has that usb 3.0, but you need to make sure the express card is compatible with mac. Will list this info on packaging. They run $35-$55.

I've got a 2009 iMac, so no Thunderbolt option - I use a 6tb WD MyBook hooked up with FW800 as my main Aperture drive and it's nice and quick. I back my time machine backups to USB2 and have Aperture vaulted to a second USB2 drive - neither of those have speed requirements, so why spend the money.

Has anyone seen a real life comparison between FW800 vs Thunderbolt when working on photos?

pcj wrote in post #14248983
I've got a 2009 iMac, so no Thunderbolt option - I use a 6tb WD MyBook hooked up with FW800 as my main Aperture drive and it's nice and quick. I back my time machine backups to USB2 and have Aperture vaulted to a second USB2 drive - neither of those have speed requirements, so why spend the money.

Thats exactly what I was planning to get FW800 6TB WD I think its a dual hard drive???

Final decision! I need a reasonable help here
I found 6TB Firewire 800 for $400 and Thunderbolt for $600
I read the reviews etc. I know Thunderbolt is fast, its even faster than internal drive. I am going to store all my RAW files and create Lightroom catalog. I will be mostly planning on working from that external drive.
What do you think? Firewire 800 will be enough? Or should I go with the newest and latest?

You may want to read this before deciding.

http://news.cnet.com …-3.0-why-its-a-lose-lose/