A friend of mine told me there was some hub where you can plug in USB and firewire things and then just connect a firewire cable to your mac. This sounds like some sort of mythical beast. Does this actually exist?
I didn't google hard enough... (lazy)
But in the course of 35 seconds, I found an internal with 4 USB 2.0 and 1 FW800 --
There must be something out there external.
A few more seconds of searching:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/BELKIN/F5U507/
That appears to be FW400 -- but I'm sure there is an 800 variant - or there will be soon.
All flavors I found were either USB 2.0 / FW400 externals - which required one free USB 2.0 port and one free FW400 port.
I found several USB 2.0 / FW800 / FW400 hubs - but all were internal PCI interface.