Can I run old external dives on Mac mini

FireWire to Thunderbolt 3/4 requires two very expensive Apple adapers.

A FireWire to Thunderbolt 2 adapter and a Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3/4 adapter.

To make matters even worse, Apple no longer makes or sells the FireWire to Thunderbolt 2 adapter.

Your best bet, is to connect those older drives to the new Mac mini using the USB ports and USB cables instead of FireWire.

What is the connectivity on the old drives? I believe some early LaCie's had FireWire ports which won't easily work on a modern Mac.

If you are not sure, tell us the model number of the drive, or post a picture of the drive's panel with the ports. Use the "Image Insertion" tool in the toolbar:

Images must be png or jpg format and 5MB or smaller.

Yes, those external drives should work fine connected to the new Mac mini.

1) You should always backup the Photos, Videos and Music Libraries on an external drive to a second external drive.

2) If they are more than 4 or 5 years old, then at some point you should consider replacing them newer external drives.

Cumby wrote:

Both are very old Lacie powered drives that just keep running.

Regardless of the brand, it is time to purchase two new drives to replace them. You want your backups to be available in the case of an emergency and a "very old drive" is likely to start having problems at any moment, but most likely at the exact moment you will need it most (at least that is how my luck always goes ;-) ).

I have recycled my old HDD drives by taking them out from their Firewire enclosures and using SATA (and ATA) to USB converters (I use OWC dual drive dock or Startech SATA-USB converters or occasionally WiebeTech ATA-USB converter).

I have used MacOS Extended (GUID) insensitive format in HDDs because APFS gets slow in prolonged use, especially as a boot volume.

I have used them as cold archive backups. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the "master" backup to two other backups, in case if/when some old HDD decides to break.

"Can I run old external dives on Mac mini: I need to replace my old iMac. I have my Time Machine on one external drive and my photos, videos and music on a separate external drive. Both are very old Lacie powered drives that just keep running. I’ve read about problems with external drives unmounting or overheating with the M4 Mac mini. I’m just wondering if I should avoid going that route if I plan to continue using those drives for now?"

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Use a Dock to Read these:

So, are these SATA or are they IDE? Rather than open up and then plugging this into your Mac, you can use a hard drive dock (toaster), and then read it using that. Find some one Amazon. One that do not duplicate the drives are extremely inexpensive, by comparison, and it may be the way to go: usb sata drive dock

Cumby wrote:

They are currently daisy chained with FireWire ports. The drives do have usb 2 and ESATA ports as well. I’m sure it’s time to replace them but they just won’t die! I do have everything backed up on a separate portable drive as well.

Can I use an adapter to connect via thunderbolt?

Apple discontinued their Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter some time ago, and it is now almost impossible to find. On top of that, I don't know how long it might be until they pull FireWire support entirely from macOS.

You can get USB-C to eSATA adapter cables, and that would be the fastest practical way of connecting to those drives. Making USB connections would be a bit cheaper, but then you'd have to live with the USB 2 bottleneck.

Here's an example of an eSATA adapter cable:

StarTech – USB-C to eSATA Cable - For External Storage Devices - USB 3.0 (5Gbps) - 3 ft. (1 m)

Cumby wrote:

They are currently daisy chained with FireWire ports.

FYI, with macOS 26 Tahoe being released later this year, Firewire will no longer be supported.