Can I clone my usb2 hard drive to a firewire and keep links?

I have a ton of video clips and music I use for editing on a 2TB USB 2 external hard drive. For small projects this has not caused problems but since I started working on longer projects it has become painfully slow.
I am wondering if an upgrade to a firewire 800 or Thunderbolt drive will solve this, and if so will I be able to create a clone of my existing USB2 drive onto the new fatser drive and the iMac still automatically be able to find the links to the media in my projects?
I'm not sure how it works on mac's but I assume that if I was doing this on windows and the new drive had the same drive letter as the previous eg. /:D drive it would look there on it's own for music and video.
Is this even a worth while venture, as as it seemed to be fine on smaller projects maybe just a RAM upgrade would be enough to get it running smoothly again?
Any advice appreciated

danpo1 wrote:
speaking of the drives, if I change the volume name of a new drive to match and the folders writing are in the right places it should treat it as the same drive?
Unfortunately this likely won't work, because the hard drives have numbers etc, that distinguish between them, even if they have the same volume names.
Cloning does this, like with Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper, and usually in some cases the Finder or OS X gets confused with the same volume name of the clone, so it has to be changed.
You can try it and see if it works, but I doubt it.

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