Connecting Firewire 800 drive to USB C (2024)

patseguin said:

I have a 2020 Mac Mini arriving today and my Time Machine backups are on an older Seagate drive that has Firewire 800 and USB 2.0. I suppose I could use the USB but I imagine it would be painfully slow. Anyone know of an adapter that gives you a FW800 port on one of the USB-C ports? I can't seem to find them. I found one for $29 on Amazon which they say is not compatible with USB-C.

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You can go from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 to Firewire, but not from USB-C to Firewire directly. The two adapters will cost you somewhere around $100. It'd be far less expensive to get yourself a new USB 3 enclosure for the disk if it's something you'd use regularly.

That might work, I'm not sure.

chrfr said:

You can go from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 to Firewire, but not from USB-C to Firewire directly. The two adapters will cost you somewhere around $100. It'd be far less expensive to get yourself a new USB 3 enclosure for the disk if it's something you'd use regularly.

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Hmm, I'd have to take it apart and take out the drive and put in a new enclosure? I'll probably just be using it to get my music, video, picture libraries copied over and then get a new drive for Time Machine. I wonder how much of that data will be on my iCloud and I can just download faster than copying it across USB 2.0

patseguin said:

Hmm, I'd have to take it apart and take out the drive and put in a new enclosure?

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Correct. You should be able to find instructions online for how to open your particular enclosure.

I have (literally) two milk crates full of old firewire drives, LOL. ? Finally archived them all to a pair of 5tb USB 3 hard drives around 5 years ago. I have the thunderbolt to firewire adapter in the link above, used it with my 2011 and 2013 MacBook Airs. It works fine, but it gets surprisingly hot - almost too hot to hold in your hand. This happens whenever the adapter is plugged in, even when no disk is connected to it. So, it is fine for a data transfer but maybe not a good solution for continued use.

Honestly, if you just need to do a one-time transfer from your old disk(s), just use the USB port and be happy. I'm sure you can find something to do for a few hours. That is what I started doing with my old disks before I archived them, it was just easier. And how fast is the drive inside that old firewire enclosure? Firewire 800 was only 100MB/sec maximum, many drives were not that fast. USB 2 typically gave me around 30-35MB/sec when I used it.

I wouldn't waste money on adapters or enclosures unless you are going to need them often in the future.

Ditto what Boyd01 said. I moved from the 2010 MacPro to a 2018 Mac Mini and was using three firewire drives daisy chained using the FW->TB2->TB3 adaptors. It worked, but I knew the drives were old so I replaced them with never drives in an OWC enclosure.

If you still have the older Mac then I'd suggest getting one or more USB 3 drives and copying the FW data to the USB drive(s) using the old Mac. Of course, this assumes the old Mac has USB 3 ports.

And I still have a fourth old FW drive connected via USB. It has a bunch of old files that I keep telling myself I'll sort though one day. Kinda like how I kept putting off going through all the stuff in the garage after we moved here ...

Do you still have a need for FW800? Ie if you have an older Mac?
If so, and you are looking for a new drive? I highly recommend the Lacie Rugged Triple. It has both USB 3.0 and FW800 - I have a 2TB one connected via FW800 to my 2010 iMac (which doesn't have USB3 or TB), and it stores Time Machine backups for remotely for all my Macs. Works like a dream.

If you don't need FW800, just pull apart the drive and put in a USB3.0 enclosure which will cost you way less.

Do you plan to still use the drive for your future Time Machine backups on your Mac Mini? You'd have to do it over USB2 which will be painfully slow.

Save yourself the time, trouble, and money.

If it HAS a USB2 connection, USE the USB2 connection.
Slow or not, it's there and you might as well "use what you have" to get the job done.

Moving the old HDD into a newer enclosure that supports USB 3.0 is a better (and likely cheaper) alternative than buying a USB 3.0-to-FireWire 800 cable.

I have a bunch of older drives and I periodically buy a new enclosure and start moving drives from an older enclosure to a slightly new one.

At this point, I have a couple of external HDDs in enclosures that are FW800/USB 2.0/eSATA. I have one eSATA-to-USB 3.0 cable and yes, it will pretty much transfer at full speed, somewhere between 5-6 Gbps. Either way, it'll flood the bus at maximum speed.

Time Machine backups are pretty slow, there's a lot of overhead anyhow which is why TM backups to networked storage (Time Capsule, NAS, whatever) is still a valid option. Having SATA-6 speeds isn't going to make TM backups that much faster.

As mentioned, the daisy-chain adapters work (I've got my old FW video interface running from FW800 to TB1, and from TB1 to TB3 using two adapters, and in the past I've even added another one to get from FW400 to 800!) But for your use cases, I'd just schlep the files the old and slow way and get new interfaces for drives, since it's probably more cost-effective.

USB2 is definitely damn slow, but just leave it overnight and it's not a major issue.

At the risk of repeating what others have said, USB 2.0 is slow but USB 3.x is not.

I have an external RAID that has both USB 3.0 and Firewire800. I tried connecting it both ways to a 2018 macMini, and the USB3 connection was faster (and simpler) than with the FW800 connection.

I just Pre-ordered one of these.

Firewire and SCSI are done. Pull the drive. Catalina does not allow firewire as a boot drive.
Also, use a Voyager 3 drive dock from Newer Tech works well.

gank41 said:

I came to this thread hoping for better news. Been trying to find a way to connect my Edirol FA-101 to my M1 MBP, and would need a FireWire 800 to either USB-C or TB3 port. Looks like the only way to do this is via two adapters, considering other folks workarounds for this all seem to be for drives and just putting them in different enclosures. I don’t have that option.

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Yes, you'd need the 2 adapters to connect the FA-101. I'd definitely want to do some research as to whether or not it'll work on an M1 Mac even with the adapters.

chrfr said:

Yes, you'd need the 2 adapters to connect the FA-101. I'd definitely want to do some research as to whether or not it'll work on an M1 Mac even with the adapters.

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In my case prior to my M1 Mac, I’ve been relying on the FW port for power also. I think going forward, even running it thru 2 adapters, I’ll be fine as long as I switch to external power for the box. I don’t see there being much, if any, data loss just because of the adapters.

gank wrote:
"trying to find a way to connect my Edirol FA-101 to my M1 MBP, and would need a FireWire 800 to either USB-C or TB3 port. Looks like the only way to do this is via two adapters"

Have you also checked over at gearslu*tz.com ?
That's where the audio folks hang out.

My guess is that this WILL work, but you'll have to use the external power supply that came with the Edirol.

Looks to me like you need:
- Firewire 400 to Firewire 800 cable
- Tbolt2 to Firewire 800 adapter
- Tbolt3 to Tbolt2 adapter

You might consider "buying used" from ebay instead of paying for brand-new cables...

gank41 said:

Sorry, didn’t mean to hijack this thread about the drives. I was just thinking it relevant because of the power delivery over FireWire. Not many people with FireWire devices anymore! I’m sure any little bit of help can maybe help someone else later on down the line.

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You still get Firewire power through the two adapters. Whether it's adequate or reliable enough for your needs is a separate question that you'd have to test.

chrfr said:

You still get Firewire power through the two adapters. Whether it's adequate or reliable enough for your needs is a separate question that you'd have to test.

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I have the power adapter for it, so at least that won't be a worry in my mind. My only concern is if it can somehow pass thru the digital signal from the FA-101 thru all of that. Normally Logic is able to tell each track and "everything works" lol but I'm slightly optimistic.

has anybody successfully went from FireWire 800 to USB-C?

I gave OWC a call today and they said that there was no known amount of adapters that could convert FW800 to USB-C (Thunderbolt 3). They did however, tell me there was a solution for USC-C to Thunderbolt 2 to DisplayPort, but who needs that?

For those of you have who have daisychained a bunch of adapters together, I’m curious to know if you had success converting from FireWire to USB-C.

Please shut your pie hole if you’re going to say that this isn’t practical. WE ALL KNOW THAT. The question at hand is: IS IT POSSIBLE?

chrfr said:

You can go from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 to Firewire, but not from USB-C to Firewire directly. The two adapters will cost you somewhere around $100. It'd be far less expensive to get yourself a new USB 3 enclosure for the disk if it's something you'd use regularly.

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The two adaptors together cost me only $47 in total (just look for sellers on Amazon and or Ebay). I have three enclosures, so it was a no brainer for me.

I've been using three Firewire 800s and an external SSD on my M1 Mini for months now.

h4lp m3 said:

has anybody successfully went from FireWire 800 to USB-C?
WE ALL KNOW THAT. The question at hand is: IS IT POSSIBLE?

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YES, IT IS POSSIBLE.