With the retirement of my late-2012 mac mini headless server also came the forced retirement of an OWC FW 800 enclosure. It was the last set of disks running Firewire that I had connected at the house. So long, Firewire - you served me well for much longer than expected!
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I remember when FireWire 800 came out and it feeling impossibly fast.
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Or the money we spent to upgrade from FireWire 400 to 800 to get all that extra speed!
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I’m still using a FireWire 400 audio interface with my M1 Mac Mini. It’s a 16 input mixer and the only digital connection is FW400. To get it working takes the following cable and dongles:
- FireWire 400 to 800 cable
- FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt 2 adaptor (both of these were already owned as the mixer was previously connected to a late 2012 iMac, the first ones with no FW ports).
- A Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adaptor
As bizarre as all of the above looks the mixer (and all 16 inputs) show up in GarageBand and Logic and it records without any problems. When looking at ways to get the mixer connected to the M1 Mac I found a video on YouTube of someone testing old FireWire hard drives on newer Macs which only had USB and Thunderbolt ports. He seemed to get all of his old FW400 and 800 drives working using a similar collection of cables and dongles to the ones I have listed above. It does look odd seeing dongles connected to dongles but, so far, it has worked flawlessly for me.
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All sounds very Heath Robinson!
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All sounds very Heath Robinson!
It certainly is. No doubt in a few years time I’ll be adding another adaptor to the chain to use the mixer with Thunderbolt 5/6/7 or whatever version they have reached by that point. I may well end up reaching the point where the chain of dongles is longer than the FireWire cable!
Luckily I’m still running my 2012 Mac mini as a server with multiple FW800 drives. I’m not looking forward to the eventuality of replacing all the drive enclosures so probably will go the dongle route as well. On a lower tech note, here are the series of dongles I’ve had to use for over a decade to keep using my Northgate Omnikey keyboard from 1989:
DIN to PS/2 to USB2. Yet another would be needed for the new iMac, for instance.
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