Firewire 800 is choppy on proxy media, USB 2.0 not...

Hello dear apple community,
i am new to FCPX and have a strange problem playing proxys in the timeline and video viewer. I import my AVCHD 1080/50p clips from SD Card directly to my external WD My Book Studio FW800 2TB drive. Options: create Proxy, playback option also selected. The playback is very very choppy, although the data rate is about 4MB/s. I benchmarked my drive and it has a throuput of over 70MB/s r/w over FW800 and about 37MB/s over USB 2.0. Then i tested the USB 2.0 cable, just plugged FW off and USB in. Restarted FCPX and... the proxy plays almost perfect, only a minimal to no choppyness. A little test with a proxy file on my system SSD ends in absolutely smooth playback.
How can it be? I am completely lost, where is my benefit of using a FW800 drive. Or is it a FCPX failure/bug?
System:
MBP mid 2009, Core2Duo 2,26
8GB RAM
64GB SSD
Latest Mountain Lion, fresh and clean just installed over night...
P.S.: ProRes422 (optimized media) and proxys are played smoothly with quicktime player, no dropped frames.

You should not need any drivers.
How did you obtain the numbers you quote (70MB/s, 37MB/s)? Did you actually run an utility on YOUR mac to get these values or did you read them somewhere (perhaps in the drive documentation)?
It may be that the FW cable is flakey. I suggest you run the free BlackMagic Disk Speed Test (available at the Mac App Store) and see if the values you get are similar to the ones above. If not, especially for FW, then there is something wrong with either the cables (more likely) or the FW interface in either the drive or your mac (less likely).

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shaneeudy wrote:
So guess my question is this: Are there any know problems with using Firewire 800 with Time Machine?
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Firewire 800 is choppy on proxy media, USB 2.0 not...

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