Depends on which MacBook Pro and what ports it has. (USB 3.0?) Beyond that there are lots of considerations.
Thunderbolt costs a LOT, in my opinion more than it is worth for just one or two drives. And Thunderbolt is far from mature - so it costs a lot just to find stuff that really does work.
In every case you need to be the judge of what is a useful cost for gain in performance. To judge that you first have to know how to determine what kind of speeds you will get.
Current SATA drives are mechanically capable of around 150-180 MB/sec. Hooking them up to a hugely fast bus, like Thunderbolt, still only gets you 150-180 MB/sec.
Current SATAIII SSD drives are good for (roughly - lots of variations here) 450-500 MB/sec. Hooking them up to Thunderbolt starts to pay some bigger performance dividends.
A multidrive RAID array using SATA drives can be 800 MB/sec mechanical speed. Again, might be worth the high cost of state of the art zoom zoom and get a Thunderbolt RAID. Still gonna cost a bundle just because it is Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is new enough that developers charge all that the market will bear with virtually no competition.
Current MBP has USB 3.0 bus. Each port on the MBP is capable of a teensy bit over 200 MB/sec. Hook up a hard drive or two to that and get over double Firewire. (or quadruple if you use both ports) And it costs almost nothing for the USB components since they are so common and so much developer competition. The math is pretty good here as the performance gain per dollar ratio is more in your favor.
But again, it all depends on your wishes and how much you are willing to pay to speed things up a bit.
Rick
