If I get a FireWire 800 male to USB female, and a Firewire female to Thunderbolt cable

If I get a FireWire 800 male to USB female, and a Firewire female to Thunderbolt Male cable, would I gain any transfer speed of the thunderbolt over standard USB speed? So basically I'm talking about chaining together a few cables and am trying to gain more transfer speed. Thanks......

Apple has announced a Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter, but not yet given a release date.

Similar Messages

  • Thunderbolt to firewire 800 coverter vs. usb 2.0

    Have an external hard drive that has firewire 800 and USB 2.0. Trying to decide if the firewire 800 to thunderbolt adapter or using the straight usb is the better connection. Drive holds my iTunes Library and VM Fusion "drive".
    Any ideas?

    Since Thunderbolt is so much faster then FW800, you should be able to see as good a performance on FW800 as the disk drive is able to provide. The drive itself is going to be the weak link in your chain.
    Allan

  • When I try to turn on my ipad, all i get is a picture of a usb cord and an arrow pointing to itunes. how can i fix this?

    When I try to turn on my ipad, all I get is a picture of an USB cord with anrrow pointing to an itunes icon. How can I fix this? pls help

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  • Can I Boot my PB from a Firewire 800 External HD?

    I'm a going to buy a portable external HD for my mirror (clone) back-up drive.
    I can buy either a Firewire 400 ("Combo case") or 800 ("Triple case") HD. My inclination is to buy the Firewire 800 ("Triple case") drive as it will be more useful in the future.
    Will I be able to Boot my Firewire 400 PB from the Firewire 800 External HD as long as I have the right adapter cable? Or do I have to get a Firewire 400 instead?
    The drives I have in mind come from OWC and have a port for an external power supply if it's needed.*
    * http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go, to see where I'm going with this.

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  • Time Machine won't mount Firewire 800 drive after restart / Finder crashes

    I've been having problems with Finder crashes. I first suspected Spotlight might be the problem because sometimes when I started typing a search, it would display the first 3 characters and then lock up. I could force quit the Finder, but it wouldn't relaunch and required the computer to be shutdown and restarted with the power button. Once restarted, I had no keyboard and no mouse click (the mouse would move across the screen but I could not click on anything). After waiting several minutes (3-5) the mouse and keyboard worked properly.
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    Part 2: I have been using Time Machine (connected to a Fantom GreenDrive via Firewire 800) for several months now and ever since the beginning, I have noticed that the drive will NOT mount after a restart. I must turn the drive off and back on again to get it to mount. After that Time Machine picks it up and seems to work fine.....well, that is until this Finder crashing thing started several weeks ago. Anyway, I inadvertently set up an experiment last weekend when I installed some software update and forgot to remount the Time Machine drive after the restart. That was last Sunday night. The computer did not crash all week long. I thought my Spotlight fix had finally solved my problems, but now it seems I was wrong. This morning (Saturday, six days later), I noticed my Time Machine drive was not mounted. I mounted it, told Time Machine to "Back Up Now" and went away for a few hours. When I came back the Finder was locked up.
    So guess my question is this: Are there any know problems with using Firewire 800 with Time Machine? and What can I do to fix this? In the meantime I'm trying another experiment - I've disconnect the Firewire 800 connection and replaced it with USB.

    shaneeudy wrote:
    So guess my question is this: Are there any know problems with using Firewire 800 with Time Machine?
    Hi, and welcome to the forums.
    Not in general. Some drives don't always wake or "spin up" fast enough; often that's seen when the system wakes from sleep, though, not so much after a system Restart. Many Western Digitals do that; I don't recall seeing any posts here about yours, but you might want to search the forums for Fantom
    In the meantime I'm trying another experiment - I've disconnect the Firewire 800 connection and replaced it with USB.
    Good plan - that may provide a clue.
    Also, check with the maker -- there may be a firmware or driver update.
    And try verifying your internal HD, and repairing your backups, per #A5 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum). Either might cause that.

  • What FireWire 800 drive (2.5") to build/buy for MacBook Pro?

    Hello community, this topic is to request a little help choosing a FireWire 800 storage solution. About once every two days, I need to run a virtual machine, either Windows XP or Ubuntu. The disk image is currently located on an external USB 2.0 Western Digital hard drive, which is also used for not-speed-sensitive storage. Performance is decent, as long as I quit all possible application before launching (I have 4GB RAM, planning on 8GB upgrade very soon) and don't launch too many apps in the virtual machine, however, I feel performance is lagging since I can see the virtual hard drive indicator turning red most of the time, and the 4 white LEDs on the WD going back and forth (although it doesn't necessarily indicate heavy activity). Especially, restoring to and from saved states routinely takes 45 seconds or more. The external drive is about 90% full most of the time, and may be a contributing factor to the slow feeling. Hence, I thought about putting this FireWire 800 port to good use, and plug a compatible drive in it. I had the following requirements:
    3-year warranty an absolute minimum, 5 years
    would be ok (my current WD MyPassport has 5). Reason is I consider if manufacturers trust their drive for 5 years, it shouldn't be a source of worry for many years to come. I consider 2-year warranty to be substandard drives.
    2.5" form factor. Reason is I rarely happen to have enough room or steady power to lay and plug a full 3.5" drive, unless it uses a battery, which is extremely rare and would add bulk in my bag.
    Ability to saturate FW800 port. I think a more performant drive would be a waste of money since they constantly go down in price, and I may be able to get a better deal by the time I switch to Thunderbolt-based MacBook Pro. Admittedly, this is a "soft" requirement, given expected use.
    Under $150 (would come to $170 tax,S&H included)
    I understand pretty well that the two latter points come in opposition and need a compromise, so I think a large compromise on drive size is to be expected. So far, I thought about these solutions:
    Fully manufactured, i.e. Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex + FW800 dongle. Major drawback: dongle is expensive, and appears to use a proprietary connector. If it breaks, impossible to replace it quickly. Alternative: LaCie Rugged (pretty big for a 2.5" drive), G-Tech (usually quite expensive).
    Handmade from performance platter drives, i.e. Western Digital Scorpio Black + FW800 enclosure. Major drawback: wouldn't saturate a FW800 port since it comes in SATA300 flavor only, but I get the strong feeling it would perform better than many manufactured drives.
    Handmade from SSD, i.e. Corsair + FW800 enclosure. Major drawback: from this page, major compromises would have to be made on capacity. Affordable SSDs seem to be limited to 40 or 60GB, and while I don't put capacity as a priority, I may have to use the high-performance drive for other tasks, such as editing short high-def movies, or add a third virtual machine. Considering the Windows virtual drive needs to be around 15GB, and 25 for Ubuntu, 60GB wouldn't leave enough elbow room.
    What solution would be better advisable, and what arguments would you put forth for it?

    Reply on a dead topic:
    After a word, Macally used the Oxford chipset. So Macally I went, and put a Scorpio Black 500GB inside. Ran fine, but I got it stolen in a coffee shop a few days after I started to use it. Had no time yet to do a backup, so data was lost. Surveillance cams weren't working at the time of the theft, nobody has seen anything, and, as usual, police won't do anything about it.
    Second drive I got was also a Scorpio Black I put inside the Mercury Mini enlosure from OWC. Marginal difference experienced from the Macally, but most recent Oxford chipset would ensure fewer head parkings, that are very noisy and unsettling, so much I thought there was something wrong with the drive, and still think there is, despite reassurance from Western Digital.
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  • Firewire 800 to 400 Hub?

    This new Mac (which I love) has Firewire 800. My hard drives and scanner has Firewire 400 connections. I bought a cable that connects the 800 port into my 400 port in the hard drive but since the Mac has only 1 800 port I am unable to connect my scanner. Are there Firewire hubs that can plug my other peripherals? There were none at the Apple store and I could not find any on-line. Please advise

    You may be able to connect the scanner to the daisy-chain port on the hard drive, if it has one. Or, if the scanner has a daisy-chain port, connect it first and connect the hard drive second.
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  • Mixing FireWire 400 with FireWire 800

    How do I connect FireWire 400 Peripherals and FireWire 800 Peripherals to the single FireWire 800 port and preserve the FireWire 800 speed to the computer for the Firewire 800 Peripherals? (Obviously, the 400 speed peripherals cona only send and receive at 400 speed.)
    My guess is that connecting the FireWire 800 peripherals to the computer and adding the 400 peripherals at the end of the 800 daisy chain may work. However, recalling the mixing things in other contexts (USB 1.x vs. 2.x and WiFi 802.11g vs. 802.11n) drags every device down to the slowest speed. Will that happen on a FireWire 800 and 400 daisy chain?
    Anyone know of a FireWire 800 hub?

    jnsail wrote:
    How do I connect FireWire 400 Peripherals and FireWire 800 Peripherals to the single FireWire 800 port and preserve the FireWire 800 speed to the computer for the Firewire 800 Peripherals?
    You cannot. If devices of different speeds are daisy-chained, the speed of the entire chain will drop to the speed of the slowest device, in this case FW400. A hub won't help.
    The workaround is to get an ExpressCard FireWire adapter, and connect one set of devices to that, and the other set to the MBP's FW800 port.

  • I need a firewire-800 external drive tower

    I currently have several external hard drives each individually connected via FireWire 800, all drives chained together via the FireWire 800 in-out connectors.
    What I really need is a 4 or 5 bay hard drive external tower of some kind to reduce desktop clutter. And a tower that has FireWire 800.
    I've found several 4 bay storage towers but that all are for RAID usage.
    I don't need RAID. I'm not even sure if I could disable the RAID part, and just use the tower simply as external storage/expansion (which is what I want)?
    I've read some of the user manuals on these RAID towers, and it seems the units are meant for RAID use only.
    I don't know much about RAID, except that it mirrors one drive onto another as a safety backup.
    Does anyone know where I can get an external 4 or 5 bay tower with FireWire-800 for extra storage only? No RAID needed.
    Or... can the RAID towers just be used as external storage?
    If so, how might the RAID feature be disabled? Or can it? 

    I'd recommend you call OWC http://eshop.macsales.com

  • Will aperture run off an external firewire 800 drive?

    Hey All,
    I have an iMac that has firewire 800 as its fastest port and my aperture library is getting too big to have on my maun hard drive. If I were to get an external enclosure will I be able to move my aperture library over and still have the same fluid workflow or am I going to get lag going over firewire 800?
    Thanks
    Ruwan

    Adding to Williams advice:
    You might consider leaving your Library on your system drive and moving most (or all) of your Images' Originals from inside your Library to an external drive.  Aperture calls Originals stored outside your Library "Referenced Originals" and has robust tools for managing them.  Read some of the posts here (and check the User Manual -- start here) and ask any questions you have should you choose this route.
    As William said, FW800 with a good drive is usually fast enough, but keeping your Library on your system and storing your Images' Originals on an external drive will be faster.  OTOH, it makes administering your Library and Originals more complex, and leaves you to back-up your Originals separately from your Library.

  • M-Audio not connectin when using firewire 800 drive

    Computers that have both a FireWire 400 and a FireWire 800 port may be sharing the same FireWire bus internally. When using both, the 400 and the 800 port at the same time, you may experience problems like audio drop outs or loss of connection to the M-Audio FireWire interface. There's a variety of possible reason for this including but not limited to bandwidth limitations, clocking issues (400/800) and bus master problems with the devices connected to both ports. M-Audio recommends using the M-Audio FireWire audio interface on the computers original FireWire port while adding a separate FireWire interface card to the system (PCI or PCMCIA). Connect any third party FireWire 800 devices to the added FireWire interface card.
    But will this really fix the problem?
    M-audio says yes & apple says maybe.
    Sound like a serious flaw with apples firewire bus.

    Damian,
    Following are my experiences. My setup is listed down below.
    -Yes, that will fix the problem. The bottom line is, M-audio FW box doesn´t like to share disk drives on the G5 firewire bus (both 400 aand 800). So yes, 400 and 800 FW ports are somehow connected internally, sharing the same resources.
    -I had a spare FW 400 PCI card lying around, and I attached my disk drives to that. Didn´t start to look around for a FW 800 card though.
    -And although it seems like a fault on Apple´s side too, I can´t speak very highly on the FW410 box either. Every time I do an update on my system, the 410 install gets messed up (won´t show devices in AudioMidiSetup, the only cure is to uninstall and re-install).
    And the other interesting thing is that every time my Mac boots up, the 410 control panel mixer page is all messed up with funny pan positions and fader values. A reset does the job, but this has to be done every time I boot up. Maybe this is working in Tiger.
    I tried solving this with the M-Audio support, and after describing my problem, they just said I should call their tech support. Being on the other side of the world, I shurely don´t wanna max out my phone bill.
    Haven´t upgraded to Tiger yet, don´t want to keep upgrading all the time. In general the system is working nicely.
    B.R.
    J. Lampela
    www.neomusic.fi
    My setup
    G5 1.8 DP 2,5 Gb RAM
    Panther 10.3.9
    1 external S-ATA (LaCie)
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    Logic Pro 7.1

  • Is it possible to convert a firewire 800 port to a USB 3.0?

    I have a mac-mini from 2011; one generation before they switched to USB 3.  Is there any way of converting the firewire 800 port to USB 3.0, that would allow me to take advantage of newer, high-speed peripherals?

    Unfortunately, getting a new computer is cost prohibitive.  The high cost of Thunderbolt peripherals makes that unlikely, as well.  It seems silly to invest in further Firewire products--when you can find them--given the switch by Apple.

  • Time Machine Server - external firewire 800 RAID array incompatible??

    Hi all
    I originally posted in the wrong forum... so here I go again...
    I have an XServe G5 connected to an 8TB RAID array via firewire 800 (running latest version of leopard server) purchased solely to act as a time machine server for a whole bunch of machines. A lot of money and resources went toward this as this is a vital part of our office. One of the machines is a completely decked out Mac Pro with 4x500GB Hard Drives striped for multimedia processing. (Thats why I need a HUGE backup partition on Time Machine)
    Now, this was working for about 4 months. Some computers still see the backup array as a destination, but can't write to it, (just sit there for ever "preparing backup") and one machine successfully is still backing up to it.
    But for the majority of the machines, when I try to set the Xserve external raid array as a Time Machine destination for the network, it comes up with a yellow "!" sign and "This disk drive may not support Time Machine over the network. Get more information about compatible drives" with a link that points here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306332
    As you can see, that was completely not helpful, and now i'm wondering if I'll still have a job after the boss finds out I've just wasted his several thousands of dollars...
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    Here is some info about the external device:
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    I daisy chained the firewire 800 ports on the back to output 2 cables, both going in the back of the xserve. Formatted fine, and works a treat. Except for the silly time machine thing....
    I think what I am going to do is completely and utterly start again... go nuts one weekend and erase everything, every computer, every wireless router, everything, and start fresh. Since there have been so many little glitches here and there I just want them dead.
    Well, if anyone has a quick fix, i'd appreciated it before the weekend

    Hi everyone, Just thought I would give you all an update on how things went.
    Lets just say that I got everything working fine... this is what I did.
    1. I went through, completely un-raided and formatted the external 8 Bay firewire 800 drive
    2. Completely reformatted XServe and reinstalled fresh (Probably not an option for a few, but I had a spare weekend)
    3. Completely reformatted all client computers and reset all client accounts (Once again, probably not an option for most)
    Essentially, I was starting out with a completely virgin setup and setting up for the first time. I installed the firewire 800 drives, and made them into a RAID again. Then installed Leopard server. Brought all the backed up files across, and when I plugged in the drive in Finder, it asked "Do you want to use this as a time machine backup" to which I said "Yes". It proceeded to create a backup.
    When that finished, I went into server preferences, and selected the external as a time machine backup for the network. It worked...
    I then went about everything like business as usual, and everything worked great. Still going... for now.
    So thanks for all that helped, maybe try completely reinstalling everything and it may work.

  • New Firewire 800 External Hard Drive and how to use old External USB Drive

    Hi All,
    I have a new LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk hard drive 500 GB - FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB / eSATA-300 on the way, when it arrives I plan to use it as my Time Machine Backup drive with the FireWire 800 connection. I am currently using a Seagate Free Agent USB 2.0 320 GB external drive as my Time Machine disk. The reason for upgrading is the USB drive is slow slow slow! I am not concerned about the data on my old drive and will just wipe it clean using Disk Utility. What I would like to do is use the old drive to archive iTunes 7.7.1 and Aperture 2.0 music and photographs. Can someone give me an idea how to go about doing this?
    Thanks!

    Hi, yes that will copy the whole iTunes..including everything in iTunes..BUT, as you add to your iTunes on the Main HD, with the ext HD I think you will have to manually update anything added. Or dragNdrop the whole thing again.. You could also locate you iTunes music Library & just copy that across..With images once again find your iPhoto library & just copy that across..L

  • Will a Firewire 800 hard drive work on my MacBook with Firewire 400?

    Hi, I have a MacBook I bought in 2008. The FireWire specs say " Maximum Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec"
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    Thanks.

    Yes, that should work just fine.
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