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New 17" MBP drops Firewire 400. What about portable hard drives now?
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
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Most portable hard drives are USB 2.0 only, and there are a few that have FireWire400.
Which you can't use with the new 17" MBP.
Are there some portable hard drives with FireWire 800 coming? To have to fall back on usb 2.0 would exactly be that: falling back.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2002
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Firewire 800 is backwards-compatible with Firewire 400.
You just need the right cable.
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"One ticket to Washington, please. I have a date with destiny."
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Mar 2004
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FW800/400 adapter.
-Allen Wicks
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Mac Elite
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Which is fine for drives you already own.
I checked out the portable hard drives at B&H.
There are a few high-end ones with FireWire800, but they are almost twice as expensive than the FireWire 800.
But the price will come down eventually.
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Addicted to MacNN
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I would wager that the demand for Firewire 800 among those looking for 2.5" external hard drives is very low, since you're mostly talking about 5400rpm drives to begin with. I imagine that Firewire 800 will eventually become the default Firewire standard, with Firewire 400 fading away, and then you might see more portable Firewire 800 drives, although probably mostly among Mac-oriented vendors like OWC.
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"One ticket to Washington, please. I have a date with destiny."
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Addicted to MacNN
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Originally Posted by Veltliner 
There are a few high-end ones with FireWire800, but they are almost twice as expensive than the FireWire 800.
So buy the Firewire 400 drive.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2003
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fw-800 to fw-400 cables work quite well, and will power the external portable HD.
Personally, I assemble my own external drives, because I can buy cases that have the interfaces that I want. It's also generally cheaper if you're looking for external drives with anything beyond USB.
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Posting Junkie
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Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey
I imagine that Firewire 800 will eventually become the default Firewire standard, with Firewire 400 fading away, and then you might see more portable Firewire 800 drives, although probably mostly among Mac-oriented vendors like OWC.
Something that should have happened years ago.
You can always hook up any crappy FW400 stuff you may have via a 9-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable, which cost about the same as the regular 6-pin to 6-pin cables and which require no adapters at all, so I really don't understand what the problem is.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
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Originally Posted by CharlesS
Something that should have happened years ago.]
I couldn't agree more.
The moment Apple started using FW800 they should have stopped fitting Macs with FW400 ports and switched everything over to FW800 only. The fact that they tried to make FW800 some pseudo pro feature and kept on using FW400 for years on non-pro Macs is part of the reason FW is disappearing now.
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