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Any uses for FireWire 800 port?

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BigCanoe

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Can the FireWire 800 ports on older MacBook Pros be used for anything today? Is the a FireWire to Usb 2 converter?
 
hasn't that not been in use since 10 years ago? I remember it last being used in early 2000s with Sony cameras. USB 3.0 kind of killed it completely and 3.1 and C definitely did it.
 
BigCanoe said:
Can the FireWire 800 ports on older MacBook Pros be used for anything today? Is the a FireWire to Usb 2 converter?
Click to expand...

Of course! It can be used for anything that has a FireWire 800 port.

I have an older LaCie dual disk drive that only supports USB 2 and FireWire 400 and 800, so I often use FireWire 800 for the extra bandwidth. There is still stuff like Audio Interfaces that use 400.
 
Firewire can be used for:
- external drives
- audio interfaces (very stable way to run them)
- video

USB3 has taken much of firewire's "fire" away, but there is still plenty of hardware out there that can utilize it...
 
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A lot of AVL equipment still use FireWire. Namely audio interfaces as mentioned above. I've also got a 2TB WD drive plugged into my 2007 iMac via FW800, significantly faster than USB 2.0, and there's no way to get 3.0 on it so it's the next best thing.
 
I have three FireWire 800 drives to store external media and backups on. It's faster than USB 3 which my MBP doesn't have, and cheaper than Thunderbolt. Win-win really, though if I had a new laptop I'd probably just use USB 3.
 
There are FireWire SSDs you can get, and also the iPod Classic uses FireWire 400 (i think) to connect to a computer.
 
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