If Thunderbolt is cost prohibitive, I suggest moving to USB3. It's cheaper and much more widely deployed, and it's much much faster than FW800 and USB2. In fact

If Thunderbolt is cost prohibitive, I suggest moving to USB3. It's cheaper and much more widely deployed, and it's much much faster than FW800 and USB2. In fact, for most external drives, it's just as fast as Thunderbolt as the limiting factor is often the speed of the drive(s) and/or controller and not the IO bus.