Thunderbolt 4 to Firewire 800 adapter

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Level 1

19 points

Thunderbolt 4 to Firewire 800 adapter

I am contemplating buying the new Mac mini M2 Pro which has 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports. As a video editor I have dozens of hard drives with Firewire 800 ports (some have eSATA also). I want to make sure that I can edit from these drives if I use Apple's Firewire 800 to Thunderbolt 2 ($29) adapter along with their Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter ($49). I realize I won't be able to take advantage of the fast data throughput of Thunderbolt 4, but that won't matter because all of the video material on those old drives is either low res HD or standard 4:3 definition, i.e. highly compressed. Are there any other adapters out there that can do the job just as well without having to spend $80? Will this solution using the 2 adapters even work?

Mac mini (2023 with M2 Pro)

Posted on Jan 24, 2023 11:47 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

19,116 points

Jan 25, 2023 05:43 AM in response to woodmeister50

> With spinning hard drives, it is not a matter of if they will fail but when.

Some sources say that old spinning HDDs might be more reliable for "cold" powerless long-time archive storage than SSDs which might need power-on every now and then (yearly?).

I still have such large image and movie and RAW image archives on at least two identical HDDs. Yes, they are old and slow but still much cheaper than getting the same amount of SSDs.

I still have a few 20 year old infamous IBM "Deathstars" still used as 3rd or 4th backup sets for some not-so-important stuff. Yes, I am a pack-rat.

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Answer 2

Jan 25, 2023 01:03 AM in response to c2saint

For a while I used my old (3.5" SATA and one ATA to FW, eSATA, USB1/2 etc adapters) FW800 HDDs with my Mac mini 2018 with such two clumsy Apple's adapters daisy-chained to the Mac's TB port.

It worked (even for an old already retired Sony TRV320E D8 camcorder via iMovie HD 6 on Mojave) but I suspected that the adapters caused the Thunderbolt LG UltraFine 4K monitor to spontaneously occasionally blackout for a few seconds (the adapters were firmly connected and not moved, very irritating).

So I retired the old SATA to FW & USB adapters and docks and bought a new SATA to USB3.1 OWC Dual Drive Bay dock (recommended for 3.5 and 2.5" HDDs and SSDs!) and also a StartTech 2.5" SATA to USB3.1 adapter (which also works fine as USB-C and USB-A versions). No more blackouts and the rat's nest of cables is much tidier.

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Answer 3

Jan 25, 2023 05:17 AM in response to c2saint

Being spinning hard drives, if they are old enough to still have a Firewire interface they are likely living on borrowed time and you may want to strongly consider getting new drives and replacing them.

With spinning hard drives, it is not a matter of if they will fail but when.

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Answer 4

den.thed

Level 10

88,762 points

Jan 25, 2023 08:01 AM in response to c2saint

I would remove the drives from the FireWire enclosures and access them in a USB 3.0 Drive Dock.

Which would be considerable faster than FireWire 800, plus cheaper than those Adapters.

for example > https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09646W9PX/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?

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Answer 5

c2saint Author

Level 1

19 points

Jan 25, 2023 11:10 AM in response to woodmeister50

Yes, but its a $$ consideration. Only a few of my clients are still wanting me to edit their older projects. I'd rather buy SSDs and use the FW drives as archival/storage. My clients tend to be very frugal (nice word for "cheap").

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