Anyone still use firewire drives?

[Unknown_K]

I have a ton of external SCSI devices for my old macs but never had anything firewire. So browsing ebay at 4am I won a couple firewire burners, a beige cdrw and grey or blue (hard to tell) dvdrw that looks like it was made to blend in with G3/G4 towers.

Some tech doesn't look interesting to me unless it is obsolete. Gives me something to use on the G3 towers I have plus I have a SCSI to firewire external converter (no idea if that works on a mac) and a carbus firewire card for old laptops. Come to think of it I was late to USB thumbdrives as well.

[Scott Baret]

I still use an old FireWire 400 drive for backups. I picked it over USB 2.0 since I had an iMac G4 with USB 1.1 at the time and wanted something I could use with it. I've been satisfied with the performance over the time I've owned it, although I usually only plug it in when I need to clear space from a hard drive and get rid of files I know I won't need.

[waynestewart]

I use FireWire a lot. Mostly FireWire 800 when I can. I picked up a bunch of used Lacie external drives cheap last year that have FW 800, 400, USB 2.0 & eSATA so I use them pretty much everywhere possible.
I also have a couple of LaCie burners that have both FW & USB 2.0 and mostly I use the FW port when I can.
I could use a few more FW 800 pci cards. A local shop used to give me a lot of old Macs that people no longer wanted when they upgraded so I've had lots of FW 400 cards and drives for the last 10 years or so. So I've used them over SCSI whenever possible. More convenient.

[johnklos]

Firewire is a nice low overhead interface which has many of the advantages of SCSI (not necessarily Apple SCSI, mind you, but SCSI in general) and which easily outruns USB-2. The fact that it can be daisy-chained is always a plus, too.

There's no reason a SCSI-Firewire adapter wouldn't work, BTW - a block device is a block device, after all.

[mcdermd]

I love FireWire disk mode. In addition, I prefer FireWire over USB 2 for large file transfers for the speed benefit. External 2.5" drives can be bus powered too which means I don't need any additional cables.

[Byrd]

I was given a couple of IceCube Pleaides Firewire enclosures a while back, the "G5 styled" ones. They're fairly old but darn sight better than my USB drives, and work well between my Macs and PCs. Faster and more reliable, me like.

[jruschme]

Some of you may remember hearing about the DoD's ban on USB devices a while back. At the military site I worked at until recently, the accepted procedure was to use FireWire drives (without USB ports) instead.

This was the source of no shortage of confusion to us technical types since, once you get past the device driver level, any attack vector should work as wel on a FireWire drive. I suspect that the strategy didn't blow up in somebody's face because it did tend to kill off "casual" file copying (i.e., the FW drive was a more deliberate copy that had not likely been attached to as many or varied a set of computers).

JR

[CelGen]

Freaking love firewire.
I still use any kind of firewirewire devices I can get my hands on such as cameras, scanners and of course external drives. I have used it several times too for its awesome networking abilities.
It's sad however it more recently fell off the industry bandwagon.I'm particularly ashamed of you Apple. It's not hard to impliment firewire support, yet you drop it after four generations of iPod? You bastard.

[ClassicHasClass]

I use FW target disk mode to dump files to and from my iBook all the time. I also use it with a "toaster" drive bay to sling backups (over FW800) on my quad and Sawtooth file server, and the quad also uses it for video capture (from a Canopus ADVC-300 for composite and S-video, and from my HDV Canon Vixia HV-30s). I find FW a lot more convenient than eSATA for drives that have to "move" (such as, in this case, my backup hard disks).

[MapGuy42]

I use a FireWire drive attached to an iMac G3 to house all my ripped DVDs and downloaded TV shows - sure beats USB 1!. I don't have the need for target disk mode all that often, but it has come in handy a time or two: I'm glad my 2006 iMac has the capability. And of course before the Flip era, I used FireWire to run video from the Handycam right into iMovie.

[theos911]

Oddly enough, I've yet to ever use a FireWire device. I'm thinking of getting a FW400 PC Card for my WS though.

btw- Are there any FW PC cards that the WS would boot from?

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

In my OS9.2.2/ubuntu NetBook ReMix world, a USB2/FireWire HDD Enclosure was my solution for file transfer from HP_Mini to the QS'02 for backup.

The 3G Pavilion NetBook has FireWire on board as opposed to the Mini . . .

. . . hrmmm . . . does ubuntu support FW Target Disk Mode?

[Unknown_K]

I have some laptops with built in firewire (ordered some of those 4 pin to 6 pin cables).

[Unknown_K]

The Yamaha CDRW is here, seems like the drive is dying (QS sees the drive and reads pressed CDs but CDR's cause the thing to reset. No big deal just needed the case and cables and will probably stick an IDE DVDRW in there.

[zuiko21]

I do use FireWire drives -- one (1 TB) is permanently attached to my main computer (MacMini Core2Duo), and also the scanner and an external video capture box (Canopus ADVC-110)

Got some other FW external drives, including a 2.5" self-powered unit. I can use them on the 7500's runing 8.6 -- so sad they won't go over 2.5 MB/s

USB sucks big time

[applefreak]

firewire to scsi adapter
this one is from belkin,

but there are other brands
microtech



the easy way to transfer content from a SCSI drive to the HD or external firewire drive of a recent os X computer

limatation
do not drag and drop all the folders at once
be patient


______________________________________________________________________________
my apple collection
.

[register]

I use FireWire with an old G3 and a new MBA as well (and everything in between). Most FW drives I bought as USB2/FW combo units, but I avoid to connect to USB hosts as the data transfer rate is low compared to FW. Getting Sonnet adapter gear to connect FW to Thunderbolt was a big improvement regarding the MBA (no improvement to my purse, however). My favourite drives are the small ones with LaCie rugged enclosure, but they could use some holes for better heat rejection.

[Bunsen]

+1 vote for combo USB2/FW boxes. USB2 for transfers to/from newer machines and PCs, and FW for faster transfers to older Macs that only have USB1.1

[krye]

My Drobo is Firewire. Awesome.

[spiceyokooko]

I just recently purchased an 160Gb Iomega Firewire 400/USB 2.0 drive as a boot drive/extra backup for any of my G4 laptops that prove troublesome.

So far its worked like a charm - I've been very pleased with it.

[tmtomh]

I agree that USB/FW drives are ideal.

But, not having the budget for one at the time, several years ago I bought a very inexpensive FW enclosure - like under $20 - for a 60GB IDE laptop HD I had leftover from an iBook repair for a friend.

The drive has proven invaluable, for that whole series of Macs that have FW ports but don't have USB 2.0 - most of the iMac G4s, the B&W G3s, the beige G3s, and so on. The drive has been a lifesaver (and time saver) so many times, when I needed to install an OS or transfer large file backups to or from these kinds of machines.

The only pity is that to use the drive with my '09 iMac (which has only FW 800 ports), I need to spend almost as much on a FW400-800 adapter as I did on the original FW drive enclosure itself.

[CJ_Miller]

I don't understand what would be obsolete about firewire. I have listened to people knocking it ever since the beginning. Always wondered what the hate was all about. Even in the early-mid 2000s people argued that it was a "failed" interface, and when it was pointed out that it was generally faster than USB there was usually a speculation that "yeah... but why bother? USB 3 is going to be out by next month and it'll be faster anyway." So these people opted to dis firewire for there own weird biases, pinning their hopes on USB 3 which didn't start appearing on the shelves until ten years later! Failed at what? Obsolete how?

All ranting aside, yes, I use firewire drives, and my Motu 828 audio interface. They work great! What's not to like?