Apple Thunderbolt 3 to TB2 adapter with modern PCs

[imrazor]

I've got an old G-Drive Firewire 800 enclosure with a 2TB SSD inside. To connect it to a modern Mac, I have a TB2 to Firewire 800 adapter connected to another Apple adapter, the TB3-TB2 connector. On my M3 Macbook Pro or old Intel iMac, I don't have any trouble accessing the drive with MacOS. However when I attempt to hook it up to a Windows laptop with Thunderbolt 4, I get ... nothing. Not even a phantom/disabled device in Device Manager. The drive doesn't even get power.

Is there any way around this? I suppose the best answer is a new enclosure, but it seems wasteful to just pitch it. The enclosure does have a USB 3 connector (a very odd one indeed...)

USB does work, but the CPU overhead is brutal, especially on my poor old iMac, resulting in more than a few beachballs of doom.

I realize there's likely not a good solution to this, but I was curious if I had any options to get the old enclosure working with TB4 on Windows.

 

[joevt]

The Apple TB2 to FireWire 800 adapter is actually a Thunderbolt 1 to FireWire 800 adapter.

I think TB4 host controllers on Windows machines have firmware that doesn't support Thunderbolt 1.

Maybe the firmware of the TB4 host controller can be downgraded to a version that supports Thunderbolt 1. Check with the motherboard manufacturer.

If you have a Thunderbolt 3 device with two Thunderbolt 3 ports that maybe you can connect PC -> Thunderbolt 3 -> Thunderbolt 1 but that might also require the firmware downgrade for the Thunderbolt 4 host controller.

Is this the drive?
http://download.g-technology.com/datasheets/G-DRIVE_mobile_3.0_Datasheet_R2_EN_1215_LR.pdf
That USB cable looks like USB 3.x. USB 3.0 is much faster (5 Gbps) than FireWire 800 (0.8 Gbps).

 

[Guenter]

Is it possible to open the drive and put the ssd into a usb housing?
This would give you much faster transfers.

 

[Fishrrman]

IF the drive inside is a 2.5" SATA SSD
and
IF the existing enclosure is open-able
then
I'd spend about $20 for a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure, put the drive into it, and use it that way.

 

[imrazor]

@Guenter & @Fishrrman Thanks for the replies, but this is the primary issue with your suggestion of a USB enclosure:

USB does work, but the CPU overhead is brutal, especially on my poor old iMac, resulting in more than a few beachballs of doom.

If it's just a a matter of copying files, then USB is okay. But if you combine with anything else (e.g,, booting or gaming off a USB drive) performance tanks. This is especially bad on the old Intel iMac. The best solution I've found so far is a Thunderbolt enclosure, which isn't cheap. But that may be the only performant way to repurpose that 2TB SSD.