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trickyred

macrumors member
Original poster
May 17, 2010
55
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I've seen this on eBay, do they work?? I'm thinking of picking one up so I could use a USB external cd drive as a startup drive in the FireWire port to install system on a Mac with a dead optical drives rather than swap it out - any ideas??
 
A quick google search seems to indicate that USB to FW converters do work.
 
I'm quite sure they don't work because of how different USB and FireWire are. I've certainly never seen one that works for all devices sold anywhere. I know they at least used to sell cables which had a female FW400 connector and some box that did the conversion and USB at the other end. But those worked only for transferring videos from a DV camera and apparently not too great on them either.
 
I don't know of any "USB to Firewire" adapters, as they are very different interfaces.

But you don't need Firewire to boot from an external ODD when using any Intel Mac. USB will suffice and any ODD will be slower than USB or Firewire anyway.
But if you have a PowerPC (PPC) Mac, you might need Firewire, though I don't know of any working "adapter" or "converter".
 
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