IMac intel 2009/10 - external HD

My son is running Final Cut Express on his Intel iMac. As his HD is getting full, he's using an external drive as a scratch disk for his render files. The disk is connected via Firewire. This causes the rendering process to be extremely slow. What is the fastest external disk to connect to the iMac?
External SSD on USB port? Or is the USB as slow as the Firewire port on this model iMac?

USB is slower in pratice than FW/400 even, but is this a FW/800 drive? That's the fastest external Interface it has. Then the drive sped matters, is it 7200 RPM or more?
External SSD won't help, especially with USB or FW/400, & very slight diff with FW/800.
Now, if you could use 3 USB Ports & RAID 0ed 3 USB Drives, you might getmore speed, but USB uses a lot of CPU% compared to FW.

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