Thudnerbolt vs USB 3.0

I was curious, with a MBPr, if I was to empty an SSD to an external hard drive, would I see a major difference between copying from the camera with Thunderbolt to another TB drive vs a USB 3.0? I am trying to devise a perfect set up and if TB drive would save me 5-10 minutes when emptying a 240 gb card, then it may be worth it but if not, then I won't bother. Thank you

Unless you have ultra fast RAIDs on both sides, the bus is not your bottleneck.

Just to put some rough numbers to it: a large, very fast SSD will generally top out at about 250MB/sec write speed (with no compression) and 500MB/sec read for large serial file transfers (ballpark high-end numbers - most SSDs are slower). Non-RAIDed HDs will be far below that. Even copying from a REDMag is typically limited to about 240MB/sec. at best, off the REDMag.

USB 3.0 has an actual data throughput of about 3.1 Gbps (with the underlying bus running at 5 Gbps), or roughly 395MB/sec.

If you are copying to a HD, the HD write data rate is what needs to be exceeded by the connection. If you are dealing with copying from a camera, it's the SSD write speed that's probably most important.

USB 3.0 is plenty fast enough to handle this for any normal SSD.
It's not until you get to very high resolution, high bit-depth RAW image data at high frame rates going to specially constructed SSDs (like the Sony F65 cards) that you exceed USB 3.0 bandwidth.

If you are thinking of going to really fast RAID arrays with speeds in the 800-1000MB/sec range, you should be considering SaS, not Thunderbolt. And just FYI, daisy-chaining TB can add all sorts of throughput issues, buffer congestion problems, etc. Don't do it.

Thank you very much both of you for the info!