Is the bottleneck on the U1 the drive or the USB protocol? Has anyone tried taking the unit apart and installing it in a firewire 800 capable enclosure or would this be a waste of time given the read speed of the drive? Is this even possible? Is the drive SATA or ATA?

The bottleneck is the drive. The maximum data rate of the discs with a single laser is around 80Mb/s, well within the capabilities of USB. Firewire would be no increase in performance.