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What do you use your FireWire Port for?

Lots of stuff

External HDDs, Blu-ray burner, scanner, old Videocam, CF card reader and audio recording.
 
I hook up 2 fw800 drives to my laptop when needed. one is my time machine backup disk and the other holds my movies.

Anyone who has ever backed up a lot of data using USB and then backing up the same amount of data using fw800 or fw400 knows that firewire for backing stuff up is several times faster than usb. I'm taking 12 hours for usb vs 3 hours for fw800.
 
Almost all of my external drives are triple interface - so USB2, Firewire 400 and FireWire 800.

I have......

4TB Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II - set up in Raid 0 and used for my iMovie projects/content.
4TB Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II - set up in Raid 0 and used for all video files imported from my camcorder.
2TB Iomega Minimax - sits under my Airport Extreme Base station (fits perfect) and is used for accessing files over the wireless.
2TB Western Digital My Book Studio - used to backup the Minimax drive above.
640GB Western Digital My Passport Studio Edition - used as my Final Cut Express scratch disk.
640GB Western Digital My Passport Studio Edition - used for backing up all my photo collection etc, and also has a partition for my SuperDuper image.
1TB Western Digital Essential - formatted as FAT32 and used to share files between MAC and windows machines.

So a fair number of drives!
All the drives above all have USB and Firewire800 - I prefer firewire800 since I find its much faster the USB2. Saying that all of the drives also have USB connectivity should I need it. The only exception is the 1TB Essential drive, which is USB only.

A couple of videos I made of the drives.....
I have two of these 4TB drives, which are set up in RAID 0 (Mirroring).....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUbBdAuzxXk

Some of the drives (but not all!!).....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_OX03uaLk0
 
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OWC Triple Interface (FW800, FW400, USB) Dual Bay External HDD Enclosure with 2 TB WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM for storage and 500 GB WD HDD for Time Machine backups.

FW800 + Caviar Black = 😀😀😀😀😎
 
Firewire is great for external HDD because it is so much faster, hopefully Apple will give us FW3200 so we can link to a hub an insane amounts of HDDs
 
Fw400

My MOTU 828MKII is an external semipro audio interface. It was about $800 when I bought it a few years ago and I've put another $300 into getting the audio chips upgraded. IT allows me to run about 20 ins and 20 outs for recording and mixing bands.
Of course I also utilize target disk mode to make backup images of my laptop and my mini.
Oh yeah, nice for hooking up the camcorder when it's time to edit.
 
I don't use Firewire for anything. In fact, I didn't even realize my computer had one. I thought that was a video port or something like that when I just glanced at it a few days ago.
 
I use my firewire 400 for external hard drive. I also used to use it for my old 20gig iPod before it died and I got a Nano. I would like to get an old iSight for my Powerbook.
 
Idk FireWire sounds like a massive failure to me....Don't get me wrong its fast and I would have liked for it to take off but I've never even used firewire except once. I would like get an external enclosure that can be used to put some of my old 3.5" harddrives from my old PC which have like 120GB of videos and what not on them...any suggestions? I was just going to go USB but this sounds like a nice excuse to utilise firewire 😀
 
I use it for my two external HDDs but will not be using it from now on. I think it's great but Apple's willingness to support it seems to be dying. No FW3200 unfortunately.
 
Iomega eGo 500 GB disk to store my DSLR RAWs. Working under Lightroom is now slightly faster than before (Seagate USB disk). 🙂
 
My early 2008 MBP has the blessing of having both FW400 and FW800 ports. My Mac Pro has 4xFW800 ports, which with a simple adapter can connect FW400 devices. I use them for:
  • Audio Interface and mixer
  • Firewire external drives
  • Other macs via target mode
  • Video Camera

I love FW, and hope Apple doesn't take it out in the near future. Its clearly better than USB and even eSata for certain applications (USB's speed... and hot swappable/bootable/powered port vs eSata). For the time being, USB3.0 is not an option, as most quality audio interfaces and most devices cant handle it, and lightpeak is still years away from commercial implementation.
 
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