connecting firewire drive to airport

[drennan]

Hi,

I'm thinking of buying an airport extreme base station and am wondering if theres any way i can connect a chain of fw drives to it without using a second computer. I'm thinking maybe some sort of network device that i can plug into one of the ethernet ports, which will have a fw port on it. will this work, i.e. will my powerbook be able to see the fw drives as if they were chained off the PBs firewire port? Is there such a product? thanks guys, dren

 

[CanadaRAM]

Short answer, no. Not with the Firewire drive(s) you have. There are USB-based access point devices, I have never seen one that supports Firewire drives.

What you can do is buy one or more network attached storage (NAS) enclosures, (MacAlly) and move the drive mechanisms from your Firewire enclosures to the NAS enclosures. Unfortunately, this almost always involves reformatting the drives, as the NAS enclosure's OS will want the drives in its own format.

The alternative is to pick up a Mac Mini or another inexpensive Mac with Firewire, and set it up as a network server.

 

[drennan]

thanks, i'll look into this. one of the fw drives is blank so i could copy the data across after modifying.