Thunderbolt Device to FireWire Port

[Paul Jonathan]

I haven't had much luck googling this, so I am assuming there might no be such a thing.

We have a Thunderbolt Raid (Lacie2big) and we have access to some old Mac Pro Editing Suites with Avid on them. Unfortunately they only have FireWire 800 Ports. Is there any adapter workaround, to connect our raid to this? I know that there is Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter from Apple, but its the other way around.

Any ideas?

 

[Bob Gundu]

You can connect any FireWire device to the thunderbolt port using the apple adapter. The back of the LaCie raid has 2 thunderbolt ports. Connect the FireWire adapter to one of them.

 

[Jeff Brown]

Nothing available to go FW to TB.

I'd suggest you connect the LaCie to a TB laptop the Ethernet network that to your Mac Pro - copy to local internal or FW storage then edit from there.

 

[Paul Jonathan]

You can connect any FireWire device to the thunderbolt port using the apple adapter. The back of the LaCie raid has 2 thunderbolt ports. Connect the FireWire adapter to one of them.

Wait Bob, so if I plug the adapter into my raid (as opposed to the computer, which I thought the adapter was used) that would actually work? I was under the impression that the adapter used a special apple driver to convert the formats. I was under the same impression as Jeff that nothing of that direction (Thunderbolt device to Firewire computer) was available.

 

[joe hedge]

The computer has to have TB on the motherboard for TB devices to work on it, so if there's a way to connect non-TB computers (like your old Mac Pro Editing Suites) to TB devices, that someone's actually done, I'd like to hear it.


There are TB Pcie cards now, but not for Mac I believe

http://vr-zone.com/articles/thunder...rss&utm_campaign=thunderbolts-great-pcie-hope

 

[M Most]

You can connect any FireWire device to the thunderbolt port using the apple adapter. The back of the LaCie raid has 2 thunderbolt ports. Connect the FireWire adapter to one of them.

That is not correct. The adapter expects a Thuderbolt host. It is basically designed to allow connecting a Firewire 800 device to a Thuderbolt equipped computer. There is no current way to attach a Thunderbolt drive to a computer that does not have Thunderbolt, unless of course the drive also has another interface, such as USB3. And even then, any currently existing Mac Pro will require a PCIe card to provide USB3 connectivity (although you can connect a USB3 drive to a USB2 port for a usable, albeit slow transfer).

 

[Bob Gundu]

My bad. I had to read the original question a couple of times to realize what was going on. So yes you guys are all correct. There has to be a TB host on the original computer. I thought you were attempting to hook up a firewire 800 device though your TB device which can be done.

 

[Paul Jonathan]

Thanks to clear that up guys! I got a little confused there in the process too.